Ireland's Cause 



IN 



England's Parliament 



Justin M c Carthy 



] , LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



IRELAND'S CAUSE 
IN ENGLAND'S PARLIAMENT. 



IRELAND'S CAUSE 



ENGLAND'S PARLIAMENT 



BY 



justin McCarthy, m.p. 

WITH PREFACE BY . 

JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY 



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BOSTON 

TlCKNOR AND COMPANY 

211, €xtmont &txttt 




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Copyright, 1887, 
By TICKNOR AND COMPANY. 



RAND AVERY COMPANY, 

ELECTROTYPERS AND PRINTERS, 

BOSTON. 



PREFACE. 



npO win with a minority is surely the highest 
•^ achievement of a parliamentary party. It 
means an appeal to the nobler elements of the 
opposition. It is more than victory: it is con- 
version. 

For seven centuries, Ireland has fought England 
physically, — a fight of incredible courage, for the 
odds were hopeless : five to thirty in number, five 
to a thousand in wealth and organization. Weight 
conquered ; and every century and every year added 
a new chain to the vanquished. 

But as soon as Ireland lays down the pike and 
takes up the word, her advance begins. She could 
not reach her enemy's heart with a sword : she 
captures her soul with an argument. 

The progress of the Irish Parliamentary party 
in the English House of Commons is a study for 



VI PREFACE. 

all minorities. It is a story of profound interest 
to readers not akin to the Celt. It promises to 
be the first radical national reform by legislation, 
without revolution, of European history. 

The story of this movement and party is told 
by the proper hand when Justin McCarthy is the 
historian. He is part of it, and a large part. He 
is the vice-president of the Irish Parliamentary 
party, and he has the trained quality of the objec- 
tive seer: so that his word, always dispassionate 
and considerate, has double and lasting value. 

JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER pAGE 

I. What is Ireland's Cause? i 

II. How Ireland lost her Parliament 17 

III. Ireland will not have the Union 38 

IV. Obstruction 56 

V. The Change of Leadership 73 

VI. What came of Obstruction 90 

VII. The Protestant Minority 112 

VIII. The Making of the Nation 125 

vii 



IRELAND'S CAUSE IN ENGLAND'S 
PARLIAMENT. 



CHAPTER I. 

what is Ireland's cause? 

THE title which I have chosen for this book 
has at least the advantage of expressing with 
precision and with sufficient fulness my own idea 
as to the nature of the task I am undertaking. My 
desire is to make clear to Americans what is the 
distinct national cause which the Irish parliamentary 
party represent in the English Parliament, and why 
Ireland should have a national cause to plead there. 
I desire to describe the methods her representatives 
have adopted in order to accomplish that success, 
which is now already, to all appearance, within meas- 
urable distance, to quote Mr. Gladstone's famous 
expression. I desire to describe the forces of oppo- 
sition to the Irish cause, as well as the forces that 
are friendly to it. 



2 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

I have been in the struggle, and I know the men. 
In that sense I have a story to tell. Eight years 
ago, I ventured to say to the House of Commons, 
that before very long the question of Home Rule 
would make and unmake ministries, and that, when 
it came to that, the cause of Home Rule would be 
virtually won. It has come to that now. The cause 
of Home Rule makes and unmakes ministries ; it 
will make and unmake ministries until Home Rule is 
won. 

In the mean time, it may interest Americans to 
hear the story of the Irish movement told by one 
who has marched in the ranks, who has shouldered 
a musket or trailed a pike in the cause of Home 
Rule. What is Home Rule ? What is the demand 
that the Irish representatives, speaking in the name 
and with the authority of the people of Ireland, are 
presenting to the Imperial Parliament at West- 
minster ? Do we ask for any thing new ; any thing 
unprecedented ; any thing exceptional ; any thing un- 
reasonable in principle, or likely to be dangerous in 
its operation to the welfare of the empire ? No, we 
ask for nothing of the kind. Some English news- 
papers write, even still, as if the proposal for a Home 
Rule system for Ireland was an audacious innova- 
tion. But it is not an innovation ; it would be sim- 



WHAT IS IRELAND'S CAUSE? 3 

ply a restoration. Some English public men talk 
even still, as if the union of the English and Irish 
Parliaments into one organization were at least as 
old as the flood. But the Act of Union is, in the 
historical sense, a thing of the day before yesterday. 
The Act of Union came into force on the first day in 
the first year of the present century. Up to that 
time, and almost since the beginning of England's 
connection with Ireland, Ireland had always her 
Irish Parliament sitting in Dublin, to administer 
the affairs and see to the national interests of the 
country. Undoubtedly the Irish Parliament was at 
various stages of its existence, very unlike in its 
conditions to what we now in America and in Eng- 
land would regard as a national assembly. It was 
not representative in the modern sense, or in the 
true sense ; and it was wretchedly dependent on the 
Crown, or on that council which was the mere instru- 
ment of the Crown. Still it was a Parliament, and 
asserted its authority when it could. So long ago 
as 1372, there was a conflict of authority between the 
English Parliament and the Irish. The English Par- 
liament insisted that Ireland must raise a larger sum 
to meet the charges of Irish administration. The 
King summoned the Irish Parliament over to Eng- 
land to debate on the disputed question. The Irish 



4 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

Parliament replied by a declaration, that they were 
in no wise bound to send a delegation to England ; 
but that nevertheless, as it was the King's wish, they 
would do so, specially reserving all their own rights, 
and of course, among the rest, the right to grant or 
refuse the additional subsidy asked of them. 

Poynings' Act, as it is called, the Act which was 
projected and carried in 1494, by Sir Edward 
Poynings, deputy-governor of Ireland, reduced the 
Irish Parliament to a certain degree of dependency 
on the Crown, and the advisers of the Crown in 
England, and on the English Parliament. In other 
words, Sir Edward Poynings obtained the passing of 
legislation which decreed that an Irish Parliament 
should not be summoned until the principles of any 
measures intended to be submitted to such Irish Par- 
liament had been submitted to the English Govern- 
ment and approved of by them. Poynings' Act also 
extended to Ireland any legislation passed for England 
by the English Parliament. Undoubtedly Poynings' 
Act, or Acts, reduced the power of the Irish Parlia- 
ment so much as to make it little better than a mere 
recording agency of the will of the English sove- 
reign. But it will have to be borne in mind, that at 
that time the English Parliament itself was hardly 
anything better than a mere recording agency of the 



WHA T IS IRELAND'S CA USE ? 5 

will of the English sovereign. The English Parlia- 
ment sometimes chafed at the yoke, and so too did 
the Parliament of Ireland. In March, 1720, an Act 
was passed to settle a conflict of authority between 
the two Parliaments. A measure was introduced by 
the English Government, the preamble of which 
declared that "attempts have lately been made to 
shake off the subjection of Ireland unto and depend- 
ence upon the imperial crown of this realm, which 
will be of dangerous consequence to Great Britain 
and Ireland." The meaning of this portentous pre- 
amble was, that the Irish House of Lords persisted 
in assuming the right to act as the final court of 
appeal, "to examine, correct, and amend the judg- 
ments and decrees of the courts of justice in the 
kingdom of Ireland." The bill declared that the 
Irish House of Lords had no such right, and that 
the right now entirely belonged to the House of 
Lords in England. The Act was passed, of course, 
in the English Parliament. But a great English 
peer, the Duke of Leeds, recorded his protest 
against it, on the ground, among many others, that 
this " taking-away of the jurisdiction of the Lords' 
House in Ireland may be a means to disquiet the 
lords there, and disappoint the King's affairs." I 
dwell on these facts to show that for centuries there 



6 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

was a distinct Irish Parliament, endowed with au- 
thority of some sort, to manage the affairs of Ireland. 
Of course it is a fact, that during the greater part of 
its history it was simply a Parliament of English 
Protestants settled in Ireland, and having no manner 
of sympathy with the vast majority of the Irish 
people. But it is also a fact, that the sympathies of 
the Irish people, whenever they had an opportunity 
of showing them, were with the Irish Parliament, 
and were for upholding its authority against the 
English Parliament, simply because it was the Irish 
Parliament ; because, at least, it was called the 
Irish Parliament ; because it recognized in name, if 
only in name, the existence of an Ireland which was 
entitled to a national Parliament. 

Of course it did not represent the Irish people. 
But neither did the English Parliament at that time, 
or for long after, represent the English people. The 
English Parliament was, until a time very near to our 
own, absolutely dependent on the personal will and 
even the personal caprice of the sovereign. Queen 
Victoria is positively the first really constitutional 
sovereign who ever sat on the throne of Great 
Britain. As the English Parliament kept advancing 
step by step in independence, the Irish Parliament 
kept advancing too ; and I shall show presently, that, 



WHAT IS IRELAND'S CAUSE? J 

on at least one great question of civil liberty, the 
Irish Parliament, with all its faults, was about a 
quarter of a century ahead of the Parliament at 
Westminster. At all events, I have said quite 
enough to impress on the mind of American readers 
the fact, that, during many centuries, Ireland had a 
distinct and separate Parliament of her own. It may 
be asked, Why tell us all this ? Is it not written 
down in history ? Yes, it is written down in history ; 
but we do not all of us read and remember every 
thing that is written down in history, especially in 
the history of Ireland. Lest my American readers 
should think I am unreasonably disparaging their 
degree of familiarity with all the facts of Irish his- 
tory, let me tell them of something that happened 
during a recent debate on the Irish question in the 
House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone was making a 
speech ; and in its course he referred to something 
done by the Irish Parliament before 1782, — the year 
when Poynings' Act was repealed, and the independ- 
ence of the Irish Parliament was restored. A law 
official of the present government, a man of elo- 
quence and capacity, interrupted Gladstone with the 
words, " There was no Irish Parliament before 1782." 
Mr. Gladstone paused like one thunder-striken. 
" Does the honorable and learned gentleman," he 



8 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

asked in amazement, " really mean to deny that 
there was an Irish Parliament before 1782?" — 
" Certainly I do," was the confident and complacent 
answer. I believe the honorable and learned gentle- 
man was speaking in full sincerity. I believe he 
honestly did not know that there ever was an Irish 
Parliament before the days of Grattan and the vol- 
unteers. Why should he know ? How should he 
know ? Of course he was not likely to read Irish 
history or Irish newspapers. His predecessor in 
the same office, actually, under a liberal government, 
once declared in the House of Commons, with look 
of lordly contempt, that he never read Irish news- 
papers. Why, then, should the solicitor -general 
under a Tory government be expected to know that 
there was an Irish Parliament before 1782? Were 
not the only London newspapers which he was likely 
to read, telling him and the world every day that the 
cry for an Irish Parliament was a cry for an auda- 
cious innovation to which Englishmen of to-day could 
never listen, and of which Englishmen in the happier 
yesterday had never heard ? I was talking lately to 
an English lady, wife of an eminent London physi- 
cian, and she surprised me by telling me that she 
had become a complete convert to the cause of 
Home Rule. I was delighted to hear it. " Do you 



WHAT IS IRELAND'S CAUSE? 9 

know," she asked, "why I have become converted?" 
I did not know. " Because," she told me, " I have 
read, for the first time in my life, the history of 
Ireland." — "I wish," I said, "you would get your 
husband to read it too." She laughed, and said, 
" Oh, I have tried to get him, but he won't : he says 
it might convert him, and in his position it would 
not suit him to be a Home Ruler." For it is as well 
to tell the American public at once, that a man who 
makes his living in any way out of the aristocratic 
classes in England, would find it much to his dis- 
advantage to be a Home Ruler or a sympathizer with 
the Irish national cause. As long as he can say he 
knows nothing about it, he is safe. Thus he can 
reconcile his conscience and his position. The man 
who does not want to be a Home Ruler must not 
read Irish history. That may be taken as an 
axiom. 

This demand for Home Rule, then, is not a novelty. 
An Irish Parliament, whatever it might be, would 
not be an innovation. I suppose I may take it that 
these two facts at least are beyond dispute. I come, 
then, to another consideration. Is there any thing 
unreasonable in asking for a Home Rule system for 
Ireland ? The empire of Queen Victoria is for the 
most part an agglomeration of home-ruled communi- 



IO IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

ties. The Canadian Dominion and Provinces, the 
Australian and Australasian colonies, are governed 
by themselves. The South-African colonies have 
their representative systems and their Home Rule. 
These colonies, it may be said, are too far away from 
England to be of any danger to her, should a turbu- 
lent spirit ever arise. I should say that, in the in- 
stance of Canada at least, the distance from England 
greatly increases the danger, as was felt pretty keenly 
in English political circles during the progress of 
the dispute about the "Alabama" claims. However, 
let that pass, and let us take the instance of com- 
munities that are not far away from England. Take 
the Channel Islands, within gunshot almost of the 
English shore. The Channel Islands are peopled by 
a French population ; French is the official language 
of the legislatures, of the courts of law, of the royal 
court. Yet these French populations are allowed to 
manage their own affairs. We never hear any thing 
about them in Westminster ; we never hear any 
thing about them, for the good reason that they are 
allowed to manage their own affairs. Take the little 
Isle of Man, the holiday place of Manchester and 
Liverpool excursionists. The Isle of Man has not 
only a Home Rule system, but it is a system 
absolutely different in every way from any thing 



WHA T IS IRELAND 'S CA USE ? II 

known in England or the great English colonies. 
The little island is allowed to manage its affairs 
after its own fashion, in accordance with its own 
traditions. We never hear any thing about the 
Isle of Man in the Imperial Parliament. If, then, 
there are so many Home Rule communities already 
under the English Crown, what reason is there on 
the face of things why one other Home Rule com- 
munity should not be added to the number? In 
every one of these Home Rule communities, Home 
Rule has either kept up, or created for the first 
time, prosperity, peace, and content. There is not 
one single example of Home Rule of a genuine 
kind working the other way. But the claim of 
Ireland is much stronger than the claim of Canada, 
for instance. When Home Rule was demanded 
for Canada, it was undoubtedly an innovation and 
an experiment. It might have been asked — it 
was very often asked — of Canada and Canada's 
advocates, " Why do you cry out for this new 
thing ? Why do you call upon us to make this 
rash experiment ? " But this question cannot be 
asked of the representatives of Ireland. They ask 
for no new thing : they ask that the old condition 
of things shall be restored ; they ask that Ireland 
shall have its own again. The system has worked 



12 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

for good, and nothing but good, wherever it has 
been tried. But in other places it was undoubt- 
edly an innovation ; in Ireland's case it will be 
merely a restoration. 

I need hardly go about to prove elaborately that 
the Home Rule system has worked well in the 
great English colonies ; but I may say something 
about Canada. What was the condition of Canada ? 
The same antagonisms of race and of creed were 
found in Canada that people lament and bewail 
in Ireland Canada, like Ireland, was governed 
virtually from Westminster. The governor-general's 
offices were for Canada what Dublin Castle is for 
Ireland. What was the consequence ? The French 
Canadian detested the English and the Scotch 
Canadian ; the Catholic hated the Protestant, and 
the Protestant hated the Catholic. All were agreed 
on one point, and one point only, — detestation 
of the centralized system of government. Lower 
Canada went into rebellion ; Upper Canada went 
into rebellion. The English Government struck a 
rare stroke of good luck. They sent out as com 
missioner, to restore Canada to order, a statesman 
and a man of genius, Lord Durham. Lord Dur- 
ham's name has been curiously forgotten in our 
time. His work survives him, however, and the 



WHAT IS IRELAND'S CAUSE? 1 3 

prosperity of the Dominion of Canada is his mon- 
ument. I can hardly forgive the people of Quebec 
for having changed the name of "Durham Terrace" 
to "Dufferin Terrace." Lord Dufferin is a man of 
great ability, varied accomplishments, and charm- 
ing manners, and he did a great deal for Quebec. 
I dare say he would be a much more agreeable 
man to dine with than the hot-tempered and over- 
bearing Lord Durham. But Lord Durham was a 
man of genius, and the Dominion of Canada is 
the trophy of his genius. Lord Durham saw that 
there was but one remedy for the ills of Canada, 
and that remedy was Home Rule. He saw that 
the only possible way of governing a country in 
which there are different races, different religions, 
different habits, and different traditions, is on the 
principle of what we may call, for lack of any bet- 
ter expression, the federal system of government. 
He laid the foundation of that system in the 
Canada of his time, and his scheme provided for 
the expansion of the system into the Canada of 
our time. He found Canada distracted by intes- 
tine dissensions and hatreds, unprosperous, retro- 
grading, in bitter enmity with the parent country, 
a source of weakness, and even of shame, to Eng- 
land. What is Canada now ? A peaceful and 



14 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

prosperous country, growing and expanding in re- 
sources and in strength every day, a country which 
never gives England a moment's trouble. If Eng- 
land could only, at any time within the last ten 
or a dozen years, have sent us in Ireland a Lord 
Durham ! If only she had the Lord Durham to 
send ! Lord Caernarvon might have been a Lord 
Durham — only he was not. " What's impossible 
can't be, and very seldom comes to pass." I fully 
believe that Lord Caernarvon had all the good-will, 
all the warm wish, to be the Lord Durham of 
Ireland. But even if he wanted nothing else, he 
wanted the imperial, the imperious mind of Lord 
Durham. 

It is a curious study now to read the debates 
in Parliament on the proposals of Lord Durham. 
The objections made by opponents of the schemes 
might be quoted word for word as speeches made 
by Conservatives or secessionist-Liberals against 
Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule scheme. If we adopt 
Lord Durham's plan, we shall leave the loyal 
minority at the mercy of the disloyal majority; 
we shall leave our Protestant co-religionists at the 
mercy of Catholic bigotry. It will mean, it is 
meant to mean, the separation of Canada from 
England. The really respectable and intelligent 



WHAT IS IRELAND'S CAUSE? 1 5 

people of Canada are all against it ; only the sedi- 
tion-mongers are in favor of it. It is not really 
a Canadian movement at all ; it is a movement 
fostered and kept up altogether by supplies of 
money from the United States. The enemies of 
England are doing it all, and Lord Durham is only 
the tool of the enemies of England. Lord Dur- 
ham's official title was Lord High Commissioner. 
The "Times" of that day — very like in fairness 
and intelligence to the "Times" of this day — 
used to make it a practice to call him "the Lord 
High Seditioner." Glancing at some of those old 
leading articles, I thought lately how wonderfully 
like they are to the attacks which the "Times" 
makes every day on Mr. Gladstone. I almost felt 
like Vivian Grey, when, as he is talking with the 
mediatized Prince of Turriparva over the prince's 
schemes and plans and ambitions, his mind goes 
back to the far-distant days when he talked over 
the same kind of thing, under different conditions, 
with the English Marquis of Carabas, and found 
it all silly and weary, and provocative of sleep ; 
and he thinks within himself, that, after all, time 
is nothing, and that, from the Marquis of Carabas 
to the Prince of Turriparva, there is not the tran- 
sit of a moment. From the " Times " denouncing 



1 6 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

Lord Durham, to the " Times " denouncing Mr. 
Gladstone, there is no distance to be traversed ; it 
is the same thing. A Rip Van Winkle who had 
fallen asleep while the " Times " was droning over 
the pacificator of Canada, might well believe it 
was just the same old drone still going on, if he 
happened to wake up at a right moment, and hear 
the "Times" droning over Mr. Gladstone. Little 
Lord Durham recks now what the " Times " said 
then ; little need has Mr. Gladstone to reck, even 
now, what the "Times" says of him. 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 1 7 



CHAPTER II. 

HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 

HOW, then, did Ireland come to lose her national 
Parliament? What was the crime, or series 
of crimes, which that Parliament committed, and 
which rendered necessary its sudden extinction ? 
The story is an old one now. It has often been 
told, yet it will bear telling once again. Perhaps 
it cannot be told too often for the purpose of 
impressing on the minds of stranger readers the 
full force and meaning of the claim which Ireland 
has upon England for the restoration of her national 
Parliament. The British Philistine idea is just 
this : " Ireland had a Parliament for a few, a very 
few, years; and the Irish Parliament managed 
things so badly,— getting up frightful rebellions 
among its other fantasies of wickedness, — that, 
for the sake of Ireland itself, the wicked Irish 
Parliament had to be abolished, and Ireland brought 
under the saving shelter of the imperial Parlia- 



1 8 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

ment at Westminster." Let me, in a few words, 
now tell the story as authentic history tells it. 
We shall see then whether it was through any 
fault of her own, that Ireland lost her national 
Parliament. We shall see whether the cause of 
her losing it does not strengthen immensely her 
claim for its restoration. We shall see whether 
the Irish Parliament, with all its faults, was not 
fighting the battle of religious liberty, the battle of 
civilization, against the English sovereign and his 
minister. The Irish Parliament was extinguished 
because its leaders were men more enlightened 
than George the Third ; because they, Protestant 
as well as he, stood up for that cause of Catholic 
emancipation which he was determined to crush. 

The Irish Parliament, as I have said, was not an 
independent Parliament in our modern sense of the 
word. It was not, even after the repeal of Poynings' 
Act, independent in that modern sense. Neither 
was it representative, according to our ideas of rep- 
resentation. It made laws for a country, five-sixths 
of whose population then, as now, belonged to the 
Roman-Catholic Church. But a Catholic could not 
be a member of the Irish Parliament. More than 
that, a Catholic could not give a vote for the election 
of a member of the Irish Parliament. The Irish 



HOW IK ELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 1 9 

Parliament, therefore, could no more be said to repre- 
sent the Irish people than a South-Carolina Legisla- 
ture in the days before the civil war could be said to 
represent the slave population of the State. Yet so 
national in spirit were the leaders and the best men 
of that Irish Parliament, that, although responsible to 
no single Catholic voter, — for there was no Catholic 
voter, — the first use these Protestant gentlemen 
made of the increased independence of the Parlia- 
ment was to endeavor to carry legislative measures 
for the emancipation of their Catholic fellow-sub- 
jects. The leaders of the movement had a hard 
struggle for a while. The Irish Parliament was 
made up for the most part of landlords and lawyers, 
and the majority represented the ascendancy of race 
and of creed. Still Grattan and his friends were 
able to accomplish a reform, which at least enabled 
Catholics to vote for the election of members of the 
House of Commons. This was not enough for 
Grattan. He and his friends were determined that 
the chains of the Catholic should not " clank o'er 
his rags." 

In the mean time an association had been formed 
in Ireland which afterwards became famous in Ire- 
land's history, and the original objects of which have 
been more constantly and systematically misrepre- 



20 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

sented than those of any other political organization 
of which I have read. I am speaking of the Society 
of United Irishmen. The Society of United Irish- 
men was founded in 1791 by Theobald Wolfe Tone. 
Wolfe Tone was a Protestant patriot, a man of 
genius and indomitable spirit and rich mental 
resource. He founded the Society of United Irish- 
men for the purpose of obtaining Catholic emanci- 
pation and parliamentary reform in Ireland. Tone's 
great grievance was that there was no national gov- 
ernment in Ireland ; that the country was ruled " by 
Englishmen and the servants of Englishmen," whose 
sole object was to advance the interests of England 
at the expense of those of Ireland. The Irish Par- 
liament was mainly elected by a number of pocket 
boroughs, and rotten boroughs, and constituencies 
dependent on some great peer or other territorial 
magnate. Tone's policy was to unite all true Irish- 
men against this system ; and it was by his urgent 
advice that the new association took no account in 
its title of any thing sectarian, and merely styled 
itself a Society of United Irishmen. Tone became 
secretary of a Catholic association, for the purpose 
of obtaining relief from penal disqualification for 
the Catholics. He had worked so gallantly and 
zealously in the Catholic cause, that the Catholics 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 21 

were only too glad to make him, a Protestant, 
secretary of their distinctive association. 

The Society of United Irishmen was composed 
mainly of young Protestants, — men, for the most 
part, of talents, education, and social position. 
Men like Thomas Addis Emmet and Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald and Hamilton Rowan belonged to it. 
Many wealthy merchants and bankers belonged to 
it. We know all about it now. We can study its 
proceedings and its records, its resolutions, its ap- 
peals to the Sovereign, its petitions to Parliament. 
We know that its objects were peaceful, loyal, patri- 
otic, constitutional. We know that its aim was, as 
set out in its own pledge, to " endeavor to promote 
a brotherhood of affection and union among Irish- 
men of every religious persuasion," with the object 
of procuring "a full, equal, and adequate represen- 
tation of all the people of Ireland in Parliament." 
For this full and equal and adequate representation, 
the first thing needful was the abolition of religious 
disqualification ; the next thing, a comprehensive 
measure of parliamentary reform. Such was the 
object of the Society of United Irishmen at the 
beginning, and for many years of its subsequent 
existence. It was a constitutional association alto- 
gether, — peaceful in its professions, peaceful in its 



22 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

aims. I hasten to anticipate a possible criticism 
by at once admitting that there were writers even 
then who denounced the United Irishmen as men 
of treasonable purpose. For these critics argued, 
as George the Third argued : " You must be dis- 
loyal to the Constitution and to the Sovereign, if 
you seek to have the Catholics emancipated. You 
must contemplate civil war ; because you must know 
that England will never consent to grant Catholic 
emancipation unless you can conquer her in a civil 
war. Therefore, no matter what your protestations 
of loyalty, you must be disloyal. If you were to 
swear yourself black in the face, that you are only 
for measures of peace, you must, all the same, be 
conspiring for war." We hear this sort of argu- 
ment in England just now, a good deal ; and we 
can appreciate it. Those who employed it at that 
time employed it not only against Wolfe Tone, but 
against Grattan as well. " Henry Grattan must 
know," they said, " that he is allying himself with 
men whose policy will conduct them to civil war, 
to rebellion ; therefore he is a rebel." Grattan 
never, as a matter of fact, was a member of the 
Society of United Irishmen ; but that did not count 
for much with his opponents. Gladstone was never 
a member of the National League. 



HOW IRELAND LOST ILER PARLIAMENT. 23 

The unquestionable fact, however, — unquestion- 
able by any one who knows any thing of the history 
of the times, — is, that the Society of United Irish- 
men was in the beginning, and through all its 
existence down to a certain event of which I shall 
presently tell, a peaceful, constitutional association, 
laboring for noble objects by pacific means. In 
truth, the United Irishmen were fully convinced 
that they were walking the straight way to a com- 
plete and a peaceful success. All the patriotism 
of Ireland was with them ; the best and loftiest 
intellect of England was with them. Their cause 
was making illustrious converts every day. Grattan 
himself, — what was he but a convert to the prin- 
ciple of Catholic emancipation ? He entered public 
life as its opponent, he soon became its warmest 
and most powerful friend. In January, 1795, the 
hopes of the United Irishmen seemed confirmed to 
the full ; their success seemed to be proclaimed 
by the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam as viceroy 
of Ireland. 

I am anxious that my American readers should 
fix their eyes closely on this event in Irish history. 
The viceroyalty of Lord Fitzwilliam is a turning- 
point. Fitzwilliam was a man of generous, benefi- 
cent, and noble life. He had been a friend and 



24 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

follower of Fox ; but he had quitted Fox, as Burke 
did, in the controversy about the French Revolu- 
tion. He retained, however, his devotion to those 
principles of civil and religious liberty which Fox 
had always proclaimed. He came over to Ireland, 
as he understood, with full powers to satisfy the 
demands of the country, both as to Catholic eman- 
cipation, and the purifying of the administrative 
and the representative system. He threw himself 
heart and soul into Grattan's plans. He assisted 
Grattan with his own hand to draw up some of 
the measures of religious and political reform ; and 
he gave it to be publicly understood that he in- 
tended nothing short of a complete emancipation 
of the Catholics of Ireland. What was the conse- 
quence ? King George took fright. King George's 
conscience was awakened. King George's Protes- 
tant zeal began once again to eat him up. Lord 
Fitzwilliam was recalled. He was summoned back 
to England under conditions of humiliation and 
disgrace. He was hurried back like some criminal 
about to be brought before some bar of public 
justice. For what? Because he had promised to 
assist the Irish National Parliament in obtaining 
political emancipation for five-sixths of the popula- 
tion of Ireland. 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 2$ 

The effect upon the Irish people was like the 
effect upon the Northern States of the Union when 
the "flag at Fort Sumter was fired on. The Irish 
people saw that under such a king there was no hope 
of any peaceful settlement of the national demand. 
On the very threshold of the temple of hope they 
had been flung back into the cavern of despair. 
What was the effect more especially on the leaders 
of the Society of United Irishmen ? These lead- 
ers were men of high spirit, brave men. Most of 
them were at that generous time of life when the 
loss of mere existence seems nothing, if compared 
with the surrender of a great principle and the 
tame sacrifice of a great cause. Despairing of a 
peaceful settlement of the national demands, they 
did what all true hearts must feel that they had a 
right to do : they flung themselves and the country 
into rebellion against the government of King 
George. I need hardly remind my American 
readers, that this was that same King George 
whose perversity and obstinacy compelled their fore- 
fathers to fly to arms against him. 

Let us mark once more the difference between 
success and failure. The American rebels succeeded, 
and ceased to be rebels. Even contemporary history 
and public opinion justified their uprising, and glori- 



26 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

fied their leaders. Our forefathers failed ; and clown 
to this very day, there has hardly been an English 
historian of mark who has done any thing like 
justice to the motives of the uprising or of the 
men who took part in it, or to the many chances it 
had of success. Had this, that, and the other thing 
happened, or happened otherwise, had the winds not 
blown this way, had that man not died at the wrong 
time, — the Irish insurrection might have been a 
success. As it is, English historians, when they 
have condescended to notice the leaders of the 
Irish insurrection at all, have treated them usually 
as fools or as miscreants. I know of hardly any 
thing in historical literature so utterly perverse as 
Mr. Froude's picture of Wolfe Tone. The whole 
description is simply ignoble, a scandal and a shame 
to its author. Yet Mr. Froude himself told me once, 
in private conversation, that he rather admired Wolfe 
Tone. 

A deluge of blood swept over the country, and 
then the rebellion was put down. Sir Ralph Aber- 
cromby, the humane, high-minded soldier, who once 
said that his victories made him melancholy, was for 
a time commander-in-chief of the English forces in 
Ireland, and has left it on record, that crimes of blood- 
shed and savagery were committed by the soldiers 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 2J 

under his command, which he was utterly powerless 
to prevent. " Every crime, every cruelty, that could 
be committed by Cossacks or Calmucs, has been com- 
mitted here." Abercromby soon left the work of 
repression to other and less humane hands. The 
rebellion was over ; and not one of the gallant young 
Protestant gentlemen who had taken part in it ever 
again appeared at an Irish meeting or in an Irish 
council-room to give his countrymen the benefit of 
his advice. The battle-field had dealt with some ; 
the scaffold had disposed of others ; mysterious 
midnight deaths in prison-cells, seeming very like 
convenient assassinations to avoid the trouble of 
public trial, had disposed of others yet ; and those 
who survived had fled across the seas to find a home 
in foreign lands. There is to this day a monument 
conspicuous on Broadway, in the city of New York, 
which testifies to the manner in which the citizens 
of that great community appreciated the public ser- 
vices of Thomas Addis Emmet, one of the refugees 
of Ninety-eight. Who fears to speak of Ninety- 
eight ? Not surely any of the descendants of the 
men who flung their souls into that gallant cause, 
and gave to it their generous blood. Not surely 
any of the descendants of those Englishmen whose 
wise and noble policy would have prevented Ninety- 



28 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

eight, by conceding to justice and right those national 
claims which King George and his ministers rejected 
with scorn. 

Ireland was now, once again, as a corpse on the 
dissecting-table, — to use an expression that more 
lately became famous. The king and his minister 
could do with her, as they well knew, pretty well 
what they pleased. The idea had for some time 
been afloat in ministerial circles in England, and 
Ireland too, that the only way of making Ireland 
manageable would be by the destruction of her 
separate Parliament, and by absorbing her repre- 
sentation into the English assemblies at Westmin- 
ster. King George would seem to have made up 
his mind to this, from the moment when it became 
evident that the Irish Parliament would end by 
accepting the principle of Cathclic emancipation. 
The outbreak of the rebellion gave, unfortunately, 
an opportunity to the King and his minister to carry 
out the scheme of absorption, — " the union of the 
shark and his prey," as Byron called it. Pitt deter- 
mined at once to bring up the scheme on which 
the King had set his heart. It was resolved that 
the Irish Parliament must be extinguished. A new 
viceroy was sent over especially for this purpose. 
Lord - Camden had succeeded Lord Fitzwilliam. 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 20, 

Lord Camden was now succeeded by a soldier ; 
but a soldier whose name is not associated, at least 
on the American side of the Atlantic, with any 
very splendid military achievement. The new vice- 
roy of Ireland was that Lord Cornwallis whose 
name will be remembered in American history, 
chiefly in connection with a certain famous capitu- 
lation at Yorktown. It was doubtless the idea of 
the good King George, that, although Lord Corn- 
wallis might not have proved quite the sort of man 
to deal with George Washington and his followers, 
he was good enough to manage the population of 
Ireland, exhausted as Ireland was after her fierce 
and unsuccessful struggle. Lord Cornwallis was 
sent over with a commission to extinguish the 
National Parliament of Ireland, by whatever process, 
and at whatever cost. 

By whatever process ? Well, to be sure, the 
words must not be taken too literally. Even in 
those days, even George the Third could not simply 
abolish the Irish Parliament, and bid his will avouch 
it. The King had to put on some show of respect 
for constitutional and legal right. The thing to 
be done was to get the Irish Parliament to abolish 
itself ; the problem for Lord Cornwallis was, in fact, 
how to persuade or prevail upon the Irish House of 



30 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

Commons, to vote away the legislative independence 
of the country. There was an Irish House of 
Lords, of course, but the Irish House of Lords was 
— very much like other Houses of Lords. No one 
expected, from the majority in the Irish House of 
Lords, any very heroic resistance to the will of the 
King, or patriotic deference to the will of the people. 
Therefore, the problem was, how to get at the 
House of Commons ; how to get over the House 
of Commons ; how, as we should say in modern 
English slang, to "nobble " the House of Commons. 
Lord Cornwallis went to work to nobble the House 
of Commons. He had three agencies at his com- 
mand, — terrorism, fraud, and bribery. He made 
ample use of all his powers. He threatened, he 
deceived, he bribed and corrupted. Ample funds 
were placed at his disposal. He spent millions of 
pounds sterling in buying up some of the pocket 
boroughs from the peers and other territorial mag- 
nates who owned them, and who counted on their 
right to sell them just as they did on their right 
to sell their cattle and their sheep. The viceroy 
filled all the vacated places with creatures of his 
own. It was a familiar practice with him, when he 
got hold of a constituency in this way, to send for 
election the commandant of the nearest English 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 3 1 

garrison, — some garrison just employed in putting 
down the rebellion, — and have this English soldier 
returned for the Irish House of Commons, and com- 
missioned to vote away Ireland's national life. 

The practical working of the schemes to get the 
Act of Union passed was in the hands of Lord 
Castlereagh, the Irish secretary, the man whom 
Byron spoke of as "a wretch never named but with 
curses and jeers." Cornwallis, Castlereagh, and 
Clare, — Lord Clare, the Irish lord chancellor, — 
were the triumvirate intrusted with the odious task. 
Let us do Lord Cornwallis the justice to admit that 
the task to him was odious. He was a soldier of 
the old-fashioned order, who would carry out every 
instruction given by his master, no matter how base 
and detestable it might be. But he had enough of 
the spirit of a soldier, and enough of the heart of a 
man, to loathe the task to which he was now set. 
His own letters contain reiterated descriptions of 
the work he had to do, and of the disgust with 
which it inspired him. He tells again and again of 
the manner in which the wretched castle gang and 
their associates were continually crying out for more 
and more severity in Ireland ; more imprisonments, 
more torture, more blood. He gives examples of 
the sort of conversation which used to go on at his 



32 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

own dinner-table, among the creatures whom he was 
compelled to court and to entertain. He declares 
that he could go back to England with a conscience 
comparatively light, if he were only allowed " to kick 
those whom my public duties oblige me to court." 

So far as one may judge, Lord Castlereagh and 
Lord Clare had no such qualms of conscience. They 
appear to have found the work congenial, and gone 
into it heart and soul. Lord Castlereagh made a 
public announcement that every nobleman who re- 
turned members to Parliament should be paid in 
cash fifteen thousand pounds for every member so 
returned, provided of course that the member voted 
the right way ; next, that every member who had 
bought his own seat should be paid back the money 
he had given for it ; and, thirdly, that all members 
of Parliament, and others who were losers by the 
union, should be compensated for their loss, and 
that a sum of one million and a half sterling should 
be voted for this latter purpose. An absurd attempt, 
founded, I suppose, on some imperfect knowledge 
of this latter transaction, has lately been made in 
England, to persuade the public that Castlereagh's 
alleged bribery was not bribery at all, but only 
compensation for injured interests. The contention 
would be absurd in any case, for much of the money 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 33 

given away as compensation was really only the 
reward of corruption ; but, besides that, the so- 
called compensation money represents only a small 
part of the money spent in carrying the Act of 
Union, and by far the larger part of this money was 
spent merely in the buying-up of votes. About five 
millions sterling were spent in all. Much of the 
bribery, too, consisted in the giving-away of offices, 
and the creating of new offices to give away. Bish- 
oprics, judgeships, one chief-justiceship, rank in the 
navy, rank in the army, — all these were bribes freely 
given. Forty new peerages were created. If a man 
was too public-spirited to sell his country for a mere 
payment in money, and preferred a peerage, or in- 
sisted on a peerage as well, the obliging minister 
granted his demand ; and to this day the phrase, 
"a union peer," is used in Ireland as a stigma, as 
describing- a man whose ancestor sold the legislative 
independence of his country for a coronet and a seat 
in the English House of Lords. 

Of course there were men at that time, as there 
are at every great crisis in the history of every 
state, — men who were, as the old Scottish saying 
puts it, "ower good for banning, and ower bad for 
blessing ; " men who had not the moral courage to 
stand up in the face of day for their country's right, 



34 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

nor tne immoral courage to stand up in the face of 
day against it. Such men commonly sought refuge 
in retirement and obscurity ; and every vacancy 
made in that way was, of course, a new opportunity 
to Castlereagh to buy some creature of his own into 
the House of Commons. Another sort of policy 
also was pursued. Any man who held any manner 
of public office or benefice under the Crown, and 
who refused to pledge himself to Castlereagh's 
policy, was remorselessly stripped of any rank or 
emolument he might have possessed. Under such 
conditions the wonder is that the minister did not 
succeed in getting much larger majorities for his pro- 
posals in the Irish House of Commons. The plain 
fact was, that any one who chose to sell his vote could 
get any price he liked for it. Any one who would 
not sell his vote had to brave the wrath of an un- 
scrupulous minister, and, if he could be hurt by the 
Government, he most assuredly would be hurt. The 
wonder is that so many men held out ; that such a 
large proportion of the Irish House of Commons 
fought against the union to the last. Grattan, who 
had gone out of parliamentary life, made hopeless 
by the outbreak of armed rebellion, came back to the 
House of Commons to lead the fight against the Act 
of Union. One of his stanchest comrades in the 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 35 

noble work of resistance is a man whose family name 
comes out again at a somewhat later period in Irish 
history, — Sir John Parnell. The Parnell of that day 
fought as bravely for the maintenance of Ireland's 
legislative independence, as his descendant, the Par- 
nell of our day, is fighting for its restoration. All 
that was best in English public life and English 
intelligence was opposed to the policy of Pitt. 

Of course Pitt's policy prevailed. The Act of 
Union was passed, and the national Parliament of 
Ireland was extinguished — for a time. The first 
article of the Act of Union declares that "the king- 
doms of Great Britain and Ireland shall upon the first 
day of January, 1801, and forever after, be united 
into one kingdom." Forever after ! We are already 
beginning to see signs enough of the worthlessness 
of a statutory "forever" in the suppression of a 
nation's right. No doubt, the hope and firm belief 
of Pitt and Castlereagh was, that with the extinction 
of the Irish national Parliament, would be extin- 
guished also the Irish national sentiment. Plunket, 
then still a patriot, warned the ministry that as well 
might the miserable maniac imagine that by the 
suicidal act which destroyed his perishable body, he 
could extinguish also his immortal soul. Time has 
even already shown that Plunket was right. The 



$6 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

national sentiment is not extinguished. It burns 
now, at this very hour, more brightly and strongly 
than it did even in the days when Plunket gave out, 
all in vain, his eloquent and impassioned warning to 
a stupid king and an unscrupulous minister. There 
is one way, and only one, by which the opponents of 
Ireland's demand can get rid of Irish national senti- 
ment ; and that one way is the extinction of the 
Irish race. Until the last man, woman, and child 
of Irish birth, or Irish descent, be got rid of from, off 
the earth, — until that great and final act of eviction 
can be accomplished, the sentiment of Irish nation- 
ality will be a trouble to Tory statesmanship. There 
does not at present seem any immediate prospect of 
this complete extinction of the Irish race. The 
Irish race is growing everywhere but in Ireland. 
The time is not far distant when it will be allowed a 
chance of growing in Ireland too. 

Something was needed to give the last touch of 
fraud and cruelty to the policy which was consum- 
mated in the union. The something needed was 
given, and it was this : Numbers of the weaker- 
kneed among the Catholics had been cajoled into 
supporting, or at all events not opposing, the union, 
by the assurances of Castlereagh and his colleagues, 
that, the moment the Act was passed, the imperial 



HOW IRELAND LOST HER PARLIAMENT. 37 

Parliament would emancipate the Catholics in Eng- 
land and in Ireland. Lord Cornwallis, who no doubt 
believed what he said, had gone so far as to declare 
that Catholic emancipation would be made a cabinet 
measure in the first days of the imperial Parliament. 
The imperial Parliament, the Union Parliament, had 
hardly come into existence, when Pitt and his col- 
leagues resigned office. This step, it was loudly told 
to the public, had been taken because the King 
would not consent to Catholic emancipation. It was 
taken, in reality, because a peace had to be made 
with France, as the English people were growing 
sick of the long war, — the war which, as it after- 
wards turned out, was then only beginning ; and 
Pitt, who did not believe in the possibility of any 
abiding peace, and did not want peace, would not 
have any thing to do with the arrangements. He 
went out of office ; a sham peace was made, which 
was very soon after unmade ; and Pitt came back, 
master of the situation. He made no stipulation or 
even suggestion about the emancipation of the 
Catholics ; nor did he ever again distress the con- 
science and disturb the nerves of his august sovereign 
by saying one single word to him on the subject of 
the Catholic claims. 



38 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 



CHAPTER III. 

IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION. 

THERE are three points which it is specially 
important to impress upon the understanding 
of American readers. The first is, that until quite 
lately Ireland always had a Parliament of her own ; 
the second, that the Irish people never were con- 
sulted about the abolition of the Irish Parliament; 
and the third, that, since its abolition, the Irish 
people have never ceased to demand its restora- 
tion. The legislative union of England and Ire- 
land bears date the ist of January, 1801 ; the 
rebellion of Robert Emmet broke out in 1803 ; 
the first emphatic protest against the destruction 
of Ireland's legislative independence, O'Connell's 
great movement for repeal of the union, began in 
1843 ; the Young Ireland insurrection took place in 
1848 ; the operations of the Phoenix Society began 
in 1858; the Fenian movement followed in 1866 
and 1867, and the Fenian movement is a movement 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION. 39 

still. All these organizations, however they may- 
have differed in methods and in ultimate purposes, 
had the one thing in common, that they were pro- 
tests against the destruction of Ireland's legislative 
independence. Through all the years, from the 
passing of the Act of Union to the present hour, 
the voice of Ireland — that is, of the vast majority 
of the Irish people — has never ceased to give out 
that protest. Every public man in Ireland has 
been popular exactly in proportion to the earnest- 
ness and the strength with which he led or joined 
in that national protest. There was always, at the 
very worst of times, a body of Irishmen in the 
House of Commons, who professed to represent 
that national protest. Some of the men were, in- 
deed, self-seekers and shams ; but the fact that 
a self-seeker thinks it to his advantage to sham a 
national sentiment, is only another testimony to 
the strength and the reality of the national senti- 
ment. If the self-seekers could have got into Par- 
liament without shamming national sentiment, they 
would have been very glad to do so. The Irish 
people were often mistaken in their men. They 
were never mistaken in their principles. One re- 
calls with a melancholy curiosity the course of 
action and re-action in Ireland's political move- 



40 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

ments for some generations. Constitutional agita- 
tion goes on until it reaches a certain point, and 
then it gives evident signs of faintness and of 
failure, and it is abandoned, and an attempt is 
made at some sort of armed organization. That, 
too, fails ; and then, after an interval of depres- 
sion, a new constitutional agitation is tried. But 
the purpose of the nation is never abandoned. 
That one hope springs eternal in the breast of 
Ireland. I can remember one long interval during 
which constitutional agitation — especially agita- 
tion in the House of Commons — was looked on 
with almost utter hopelessness and distrust by the 
great majority of the Irish people. The policy of 
every English government was to endeavor, in all 
possible ways, to win over to what I may call 
the imperial, or British, side, any man of ability 
whom the Irish people sent to Parliament to 
bear witness in Ireland's name. Once such a 
man could be induced to take office, to become 
a member of an English administration, to be- 
come the servant of an English prime minister, 
he was gone from the national ranks, and from 
the cause of his country. This was the fate of 
Sheil, O'Connell's foremost colleague and only pos- 
sible rival in the days of the struggle for Catholic 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION. 4 1 

emancipation. O'Connell himself lost much of his 
popularity because at a later day he tried to support 
Sheil, when Sheil, having accepted office, sought to 
be re-elected to the House of Commons. Not even 
O'Connell's influence could obtain the pardon of the 
Irish people for the man who had thus gone over to 
the enemy. The Irish people, by an instinct both 
natural and just, always assumed that the Irish 
nationalist who took office in an English adminis- 
tration had gone over to the enemy. Unfortunately 
there were always deserters of the kind. How could 
it be otherwise ? England had every thing to offer 
which could tempt ambition : Ireland could offer 
nothing but her confidence and her love. Once 
there sprang up in the House of Commons a little 
band or gang of Irish adventurers, who, after having 
made impassioned professions of nationalism, in 
order to get into Parliament, began when they had 
got in there to propagate the doctrine that the best 
way in which an Irish member could serve his coun- 
try was by taking office in an English government. 
To be sure, they admitted, if one man alone were to 
take office, not much good would come of that. He 
would be simply absorbed into the administration ; 
rolled round in its diurnal course, like rocks and hills 
and trees. But how if several Irishmen were to get 



42 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

office at once ? Could they not then, standing loy- 
ally together, bring such an influence to bear on 
their English colleagues as must obtain redress for 
the wrongs of their country ? From the first, these 
men and their policy and their professions were dis- 
trusted by true Irish nationalists in and out of the 
House of Commons. But they had their day, and 
they were clever and audacious ; and they did suc- 
ceed in palming themselves off upon an English 
liberal minister as representatives of the national 
sentiment of Ireland. An English minister was fool- 
ish enough to think that he was conciliating Ireland 
when he gave office to some of these men. The 
leader of the band was made a lord of the treasury ; 
another was appointed a commissioner of income-tax 
for England ; the orator of the party, a lawyer, who 
knew nothing of law, but had an eloquent tongue 
and an unabashed forehead, became solicitor-general 
for Ireland. The principal men in the party, includ- 
ing the three I have just mentioned, were four; and 
they were banded together in all manner of financial 
as well as political enterprises. They were great at 
starting banks, floating companies, devising and 
multiplying financial schemes of all kinds. Of 
course all this, like their political achievement, was 
for the good of Ireland. Things went on delight- 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION 43 

fully until one day the bubble suddenly burst. What 
happened then ? I have said that four men were 
allied together in every thing, financial as well as 
political. What happened to them ? It is an inter- 
esting story, and it can be told in a few sentences. 
The first of the four turned out to be a forger and a 
swindler, and escaped from justice by committing 
suicide on Hampstead Heath near London. The 
second, his brother, turned out to be a swindler ; and 
he fled across the seas, and was gone, no man knew 
whither ; and the House of Commons, for its own 
credit's sake, went through the ceremony of formally 
erasing his name from the historic roll of its mem- 
bers. The third, who had been made commissioner 
of income-tax, finding that a storm was coming, 
thoughtfully put the available proceeds of his tax 
into his pocket, and prudently retired to a distant 
country across the ocean, and disappeared from poli- 
tics. Still there was the fourth, the lawyer of the 
tongue and the " cheek." He held his ground ; and 
the question arose, what was the English Government 
to do with him ? He had been mixed up in all the 
financial and political schemes of the others, and 
what was to be done with him now ? The English 
ministers thought the matter over, and perhaps were 
not certain that they could obtain a conviction if 



44 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

they were to put him into the dock as a criminal. 
Perhaps they also thought it would be inconvenient 
to put him on his trial, and let the whole story of 
his life and his associates be told to an astounded 
world. So, as they did not think it prudent to put 
him into the dock as a criminal, they put him on the 
bench of justice as a judge. Yes, this is the simple 
historical fact, without exaggeration of any kind. 
They made this man a judge for life on the Irish 
bench ; and the English press and the English public 
of that day could not understand for the life of them 
why the Irish people should be dissatisfied with the 
administration of justice in Ireland. 

Naturally this catastrophe gave a great shock to 
parliamentary agitation in Ireland. The Irish peo- 
ple became sick of it, disgusted with it. There 
were true and honest Irishmen still in the House 
of Commons, who stuck to their posts, and kept 
the national flag flying. But even these men were 
disposed rather for reform in the land system than 
for repeal of the union. Now, we all know what 
happens in any country where there is a sense of 
national wrong, and where for any reason the people 
begin to lose faith in open and constitutional agita- 
tion. All our reading of history, all our personal 
experience, tells us what happens then. Of course 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION 45 

the era of secret organization, the era of conspiracy, 
sets in ; so it was in Ireland. The collapse of par- 
liamentary agitation was followed by the Fenian 
movement ; the effort of men undoubtedly brave, 
conscientious, and patriotic, to do something for 
their country, seeing that other men and other ways 
had failed. One great thing the Fenian movement 
did for Ireland : it roused the attention of an illus- 
trious English statesman to the fact that there 
was an Irish national cause, and that there were 
Irishmen who knew how to die for it. Mr. Glad- 
stone himself has told the world of this ; has told 
how even the very desperation of some of the deeds 
done, or attempts made, by the Fenians, brought 
the reality of the Irish question home to his mind, 
and set him thinking what he could do to solve 
the terrible problem. 

Meantime, however, the movement for the resto- 
ration of the Irish national Parliament seemed to 
have come to a stop ; seemed, indeed, to have gone 
out of most men's minds altogether. Mr. Glad- 
stone himself was still under the impression that 
Ireland wanted nothing more than some remedial 
measures, which could be accomplished for her in 
the imperial Parliament. For a long time there 
was no public and national evidence to the con- 



46 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

trary ; although every Irish party in the House of 
Commons, every party which kept up the slightest 
profession of representing the Irish people, main- 
tained as a part of their public platform the right 
of Ireland to the restoration of her national Par- 
liament. Nothing, however, was done to keep any 
strong agitation going. In the House of Commons, 
there were some sincere and able representatives 
of the national cause, who kept the light burning, 
who at all events did not allow it to go out alto- 
gether. There were men like the late John Francis 
Maguire, a powerful debater, a thorough patriot ; 
like the late Frederick Lucas, — an Englishman by 
the way, but one of those Englishmen who rise up 
on Ireland's side in every crisis of Irish history. 
Frederick Lucas loved Ireland, and understood her : 
she will not forget him. There was Charles Gavan 
Duffy ; there was the late Sir John Gray, father of 
my friend Edward Dwyer Gray, who is one of the 
leading members of the Irish parliamentary party. 
These men and a few others spoke up for Ireland 
still ; but even they found it more practical for the 
hour to turn their attention to the system of land- 
tenure and landlordism in Ireland, with the hope of 
bringing about some measure of reform there. They 
could do but little even in that. Soon Lucas died ; 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION. 47 

Duffy went to Australia to begin a new career there, 
a career which turned out in every way successful 
and honorable. There could hardly be said to be 
any longer an Irish party working in the House of 
Commons, for the restoration of Ireland's legislative 
independence. It was not that the desire of the 
nation had chilled ; it was only because the nation 
had lost faith in the imperial Parliament. Truly 
the hour was sad alike for the Irish nationalist 
who had no hope from parliamentary agitation, and 
the Irish nationalist who could not believe that 
an armed insurrection would have any chance of 
success. 

To this latter class of Irishmen, I myself had 
come to belong. I did not believe there was the 
remotest ray of hope for any Irish insurrection, 
unless it were made at a time when England was 
engaged in some great foreign war. Even if such 
an event were to come about, and Ireland were to 
be aided by the arms of a foreign power, I thought 
it extremely probable, that, when peace came to 
be made, the independence of Ireland would not be 
rigidly insisted on as a condition of the arrange- 
ment. And then I had other ideas and hopes. 
I am only saying here what I have said in the 
House of Commons : that if I really believed there 



48 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

was no possibility of our recovering our national 
Parliament by peaceful agitation, and if there 
seemed any ray of hope for an armed insurrection, 
I should think true nationalists justified in trying 
the appeal to arms, even although, as Theodore 
Parker once said of resistance to the fugitive-slave 
law cases, in so doing they dug their own graves 
and the graves of ten thousand men. But I had 
still a strong faith in the power of constitutional 
agitation, and of public opinion. I had also a strong 
faith in the ultimate sense of justice of the English 
people, of the great working democracy. I had lived 
in England for many years ; I had taken part in 
many public movements there, and I knew some- 
thing of the English democracy. Some time or 
other, I knew, these English democrats — I am 
using the word, of course, in its English sense — 
will have the franchise, and enfranchised they will 
help to give Ireland back her national Parliament. 

Suddenly, no one could quite tell how, the politi- 
cal atmosphere of Ireland seemed to be lightened 
by a new hope. A new chapter of our history 
was to all appearance opening. Another movement 
was afoot for the restoration of Ireland's Parlia- 
ment. The new movement sought not for repeal, 
but for Home Rule. 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION. 49 

The first impulse given to the Home Rule move- 
ment was given by some of the Protestants in 
Ireland. They were not for the most part, this 
time, Protestants of the national and patriotic order, 
— Protestants like Wolfe Tone and Edward Fitz- 
gerald and Smith O'Brien. The men, or at least 
the greater number of them, who helped to set 
this new movement going, were regular members 
of what we may call the British garrison in Ire- 
land, men who hated every truly national memory 
or movement ; but they were under the influence 
of a wild outburst of fury against Mr. Gladstone's 
disestablishment of the Irish State Church, and 
they were ready to do any thing to show their 
wrath. " Rather than submit to legislation of that 
kind," — so they said, — " rather than see religious 
equality, and we don't know what else, introduced 
into the country, let us go for Home Rule at once. 
We should positively have a better chance of hold- 
ing our own with our own people than with Glad- 
stone and his English Radicals." In this spirit, 
such Protestants and Tories as Col. King Harman 
joined with the nationalists in forming the new 
movement for Home Rule, the movement which for 
the first time took the name of Home Rule. King 
Harman and his friends were not much in earnest, 



50 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

and they soon found out that religious ascendancy- 
would have just as little chance in Ireland self- 
governed as in any other country self-governed ; 
and they fell away from the cause, and became, 
some of them, its bitterest enemies. Irish Home 
Rulers were looking about vaguely for a leader, 
and suddenly the leader came. Mr. Isaac Butt 
re-appeared in public life. 

Mr. Isaac Butt had begun his career as a professor 
in Dublin University, as a Tory and a resolute oppo- 
nent of O'Connell and O'Connell's policy. He was 
an advocate by profession, and he so rose to a com- 
manding position at the Irish bar. He was a really 
great advocate. His eloquence was at once impas- 
sioned and subtile. He could detect a flaw in a 
chain of evidence, or of argument, with a wonderful 
quickness. He could wind his reasoning in and 
out of and round his opponent's case ; and then he 
could give his passionate eloquence full way, until it 
seemed to sweep all opposition before it. I suppose 
he must have come nearer to O'Connell, as orator 
and advocate and lawyer combined, than any other 
man of recent days in Ireland, although I am far 
indeed from suggesting that Butt was O'Connell's 
equal either as orator or as lawyer. He defended 
Smith O'Brien and Meagher when they were tried 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION 5 I 

for Jiigh treason at Clonmel in 1848. Later on, 
he defended the Phoenix men. Later still, he de- 
fended the Fenians. Gradually, by thus defending 
nationalists, he grew himself to be a nationalist. In 
the mean time, however, he had been for a while the 
spokesman and orator of the English protection 
party, when they tried to get up a re-actionary 
movement, after the leading Conservative statesmen 
had declared that they would make no further at- 
tempt to reverse the policy of Sir Robert Peel. 
Butt sat, for a short time, in the House of Commons 
as member for a small English borough. He was 
still a Tory, and, as a Tory, he got elected for an 
Irish constituency ; but he was fast coining round to 
the national creed. 

Therefore, when the new Home Rule movement 
started, Mr. Butt was the manifest and the only 
leader. He had been out of Parliament for some 
time ; but he was easily persuaded to return to the 
House of Commons, and the parliamentary move- 
ment began. Mr. Butt got around him a body of 
nearly sixty Irish members pledged to Home Rule. 
Some years later Mr. Gladstone described most of 
these men in a phrase of unintentional aptitude, 
when he spoke of them as "the nominal Home 
Rulers." Nominal Home Rulers they were, most of 



52 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

them, and nothing more. At the time it was not 
possible for men to get in for a popular Irish con- 
stituency without professing a devotion to Home 
Rule ; therefore a great many men professed a de- 
votion to Home Rule, who had not the slightest faith 
in the movement, and never believed the Home 
Rule question would give any trouble to anybody. 
Undoubtedly, also, many of Mr. Butt's followers, 
especially among the younger men who had newly 
come into Parliament, were sincere and earnest in 
their political and patriotic professions. Some of 
these men have since proved their sincerity by years 
of devotion to the national cause, under conditions 
hard enough to strain, now and then, the most un- 
swerving patriotism. But the majority of the party 
were, in the strictest sense of the words, nominal 
Home Rulers. They were the best Mr. Butt could 
get, however, at the time. The franchise in Ireland 
was so restricted that the vast majority of the popu- 
lation had no direct part whatever in the election of 
a member of Parliament. The election was, to a 
great extent, in the hands of the landlord party and 
of the shopkeepers in the towns, who often were 
themselves dependent on the patronage of the land- 
lords. The tenant farmers, when they had votes, 
were always stanch and stalwart patriots ; but the 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION 53 

strength of the landlord class, and of those who 
had to depend on the landlord class, was very great, 
and the effect was shown in the constitution of Mr. 
Butt's party. Mr. Butt did the best he could, as he 
saw things ; but his policy was barren, could be 
nothing but barren. His policy was to bring in, 
every session, a series of bills for the redress of the 
grievances of Ireland, — for land-tenure reform, elec- 
toral reform, municipal reform, and so forth ; and 
to have a motion every session, — that is, every 
year, — in favor, not indeed of Home Rule, but of 
the appointment of a parliamentary committee to 
inquire into the nature of the Home Rule claim. 
The bills were, of course, rejected, session after ses- 
sion, by large majorities. The Home Rule motion 
led to what we call " a full-dress debate," once every 
session ; that is, once every year. Mr. Butt made 
a great speech ; several of his followers made elo- 
quent, argumentative, and what ought to have been 
convincing, speeches : but no vote was won over to 
their cause. The minister of the day delivered a 
reply, in which he complimented the Home Rule 
members on the eloquence and ability with which 
they had pleaded their national cause, and then went 
on to show, in a few easy sentences, that it was 
utterly out of the question for them to expect an 



54 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

English government to treat any such demand seri- 
ously. The minister rarely condescended to sober 
and sustained argument. He treated the whole 
business as a sort of annual ceremonial, as indeed 
it was to a great extent ; and then the division 
was taken, and the Home Rulers, and perhaps half 
a dozen English and Scotch sympathizers, went one 
way, and the other members of the House of 
Commons went the other way ; and of course the 
motion for an inquiry into the merits of the Home 
Rule claim was beaten by an utterly overwhelming 
majority. Then the Home Rule claim was allowed 
to go to sleep for another session ; that is, for 
another year. It made hardly any impression on 
the House of Commons. It was regarded as one 
of the annual performances which have to be got 
through, and which, after all, only waste a day or 
so, and can do no great harm to anybody. On the 
public, out of doors, the annual debate made no 
impression at all. The great majority of the Eng- 
lish public cared nothing, because they knew noth- 
ing, about Home Rule. They did not know that 
the Irish people were in earnest in asking for Home 
Rule. They hardly knew that there was an avowed 
Home Rule party in the House of Commons. The 
annual performance might have gone on year after 



IRELAND WILL NOT HAVE THE UNION. 55 

year, to the end of time, without the Home Rule 
claim advancing thereby one single pace. Happily 
for the peaceful solution of the Irish question, there 
were men in Mr. Butt's party who soon chafed 
against his hopeless policy, and at last broke utterly 
away from it, and started a policy of their own. 
Mr. Butt endeavored to persuade them : they would 
not be persuaded. He endeavored to overbear them : 
they would not be overborne. They grew stronger 
as he grew weaker ; and before long his policy was 
thrust altogether aside, and a few daring and reso- 
lute men had entered on the policy of obstruction. 



56 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 



CHAPTER IV. 

OBSTRUCTION. 

IT was not Mr. Parnell who began, in our day, 
the policy of Irish obstruction. Mr. Parnell 
was not yet a member of the House of Commons 
when Mr. Biggar made his famous speech, four 
hours in length, and of which hardly a word was 
heard by the few who were in the House. But it 
was Mr. Parnell who first saw the use to which 
obstruction, systematic, organized, irrepressible ob- 
struction, could be turned, for the purpose of forcing 
the claims of Ireland on the attention of England. 
The experiment was tried somewhat tentatively at 
first. Parnell seized some question in regard to his 
view of which he could fairly expect some public 
sympathy, and he obstructed the Conservative gov- 
ernment in their work if they refused to satisfy his 
demand. For example, England owes to Parnell, 
more than to any other man, the abolition of the 
abominable system of flogging in the army, which 



OBSTR UC TION. 5 7 

English governments had clung to after all other 
civilized governments had abandoned it. There was 
always a small philanthropic party of men in the 
House of Commons who opposed the system, and 
made endeavor at its abolition ; but they only did so 
in the familiar and orthodox way. They made an 
annual motion in favor of the abolition of flogging, 
or they got up a debate during the progress of the 
army estimates. A few speeches were made. The 
war minister of the day replied by insisting that the 
English army could not possibly be kept together 
unless the soldiers were well flogged ; and then a 
division was taken, and the philanthropists were left 
in a pitiful minority, and nothing more was heard 
of the matter for another year. Parnell showed the 
opponents of the lash a better way of approaching 
their object. He had himself a profound detestation 
for the flogging system, and he set to work to make 
manifest his sentiments by obstructing the army 
estimates with motions for the abolition of flogging, 
and incessant speeches made by his followers in 
support of his motions. In committee of the whole 
House, a member can speak as often as he pleases ; 
and Mr. Parnell and his followers used their privi- 
lege remorselessly in denouncing the flogging sys- 
tem. The Liberals were then in opposition. Sir 



58 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

Charles Dilke and Mr. Chamberlain supported Mr. 
Parnell and his tactics. Other Liberals, too, sup- 
ported him. The thing began to look dangerous for 
the Government. Lord Hartington was then leader 
of the opposition. It was during the temporary 
retirement of Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Hartington 
at first denounced Mr. Parnell and the English Radi- 
cals who were making common cause with him. All 
the worse for Lord Hartington ! for English Radi- 
cals everywhere took up the cry, and Lord Harting- 
ton had to eat his words. He had actually to take 
up the cause himself. He had to bring forward, as 
leader of the opposition, a motion condemning flog- 
ging in the army and navy ; and the flogging system 
was doomed. It came to an end altogether soon 
after. Parnell himself learned a great deal from the 
result of his policy on the army regulation struggle. 
Perhaps it was then it first became quite clear to his 
mind, that thus, and not otherwise, was the way to 
be opened for the true movement to Home Rule. 
Certainly from that time he was a recognized power 
in the House of Commons. From that time Irish 
obstruction was a definite policy with a definite 
purpose. 

Nothing, however, could have been more misun- 
derstood in the beginning, and for many years of its 



obstruction: 59 

working, than that policy of obstruction. Let it be 
said, to start with, that obstruction was no new de- 
vice, originating in the purely mischievous brains of 
the Irish national party. Obstruction is an art that 
has always been practised for one object or another 
by politicians and parties in the House of Commons. 
Sir Robert Peel, the great Sir Robert, practised 
a policy of systematic obstruction to resist Lord 
Grey's Reform Bill in 1831 and 1832. This obstruc- 
tion was conducted by means of a regularly ap- 
pointed committee, and it used to occupy whole 
nights in the purely and nakedly obstructive work 
of proposing and supporting alternate motions 
"that this debate be now adjourned," and "that 
this House do now adjourn." Mr. Gladstone led 
a policy of pure obstruction for the sake of re- 
sisting the passage of the Divorce Bill, a measure 
to which he had the strongest conscientious objec- 
tion. Mr. John Francis Maguire, of whom I have 
already spoken, and whose integrity and honor were 
acknowledged in his lifetime and after his death by 
men of all parties, formulated deliberately a policy 
of obstruction, — he called it obstruction, — as the 
only way by which any Irish party could obtain a 
hearing for Irish grievances within the walls of the 
House of Commons. Mr. Maguire again and again 



60 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

advocated and urged such a policy ; but it was not 
taken up by the Irish members of that time, and 
his wise idea was never allowed to test itself in 
action. Since that day my old and esteemed friend 
Sir John Pope Hennessy, now governor of the 
Mauritius, then member for an Irish county, made 
himself famous as an obstructionist. He was a fol- 
lower and an intense admirer of Mr. Disraeli ; and 
it was in Mr. Disraeli's interests, and often at Mr. 
Disraeli's suggestion, that he carried out his bold and 
skilful plans for the obstruction and delay of min- 
isterial measures when Mr. Disraeli was leading the 
opposition. Mr. James Lowther, who several times 
held office under a Conservative government, and 
was for a while chief secretary to the lord lieutenant 
of Ireland, was celebrated in the House for his early 
career of dashing and unabashed obstruction. Sir 
Charles Dilke, at one period of his political life, was 
as indomitable and fearless an obstructionist as the 
House of Commons has ever seen. 

Obstruction is, then, and always was, a recognized 
weapon of parliamentary warfare. Let me assure 
my American readers that any one who disputes 
this assertion either does not know what he is 
talking about, or gives a denial which is meant to 
deceive. Why, then, was there such a shriek of 



OBSTRUCTION. 6 1 

universal indignation against the Irish obstruction- 
ists ? For one reason, because they were Irish, 
because they refused to consult the convenience or 
the interests of either of the two great political 
parties. It seemed, to the ordinary British member 
of Parliament, as if the world were coming to an 
end, when he heard these Irishmen declaring in 
the House of Commons, and declaring with all 
appearance of thorough sincerity, that they did 
not care three straws for the convenience of the 
Liberals, or of the Tories; for the opinions of 
the London daily papers, or the London clubs. I 
do not say, however, that this is all. It is not by 
any means all. Up to that time, obstruction, as 
practically known to the House of Commons, had 
taken the form of obstruction to some one particu- 
lar measure. When Peel obstructed the Reform 
Bill, he did not say, or allow it to be understood, 
that he would obstruct every measure introduced 
by the Government of Lord Grey and Lord John 
Russell. When Gladstone obstructed the Divorce 
Bill, his policy was known to apply to the Di- 
vorce Bill only. When Pope Hennessy obstructed 
for Disraeli, he always at least professed to be 
opposing only some one particular measure ; and, 
although he and his leader may have had in their 



62 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

own minds some clear idea of delaying and discredit- 
ing the whole work of the administration, yet they 
certainly never allowed any intention of that kind to 
find expression in words. But Mr. Parnell and his 
party boldly and repeatedly avowed their intention 
to obstruct all parliamentary business until Irish 
grievances had had a fair hearing. This was what 
exasperated and infuriated the average Englishman. 
The average Englishman knew nothing then about 
Home Rule ; and for him to be told in the coolest 
way that no work was to be done in the English 
Parliament until the Home Rule question had been 
duly considered, was about as trying to the temper 
as to be informed that some naughty child had de- 
termined never to cease squalling in his ears until 
the squaller got the moon for a plaything. The 
comic periodical, " Punch," actually did suggest, in 
not very decorous fashion, that the obstructives 
should be treated in just the way which the importu- 
nate infant would be likely to come in for if he 
kept up his wailings too long. Let me do justice 
to the average Englishman. He had no reason to 
suppose, educated in the way he had been, that 
the six or seven men who were known as obstruc- 
tionists really represented a national cause, and had 
a people behind them. These men had come into 



OBSTRUCTION. 63 

Parliament without any previous political career. 
Not one of them was known even by name to the 
English newspaper - reader. The whole lot were 
disavowed by all the other Irish members of Par- 
liament, including the recognized leader of the 
Home Rule party, Isaac Butt himself. A member 
of the Irish Home Rule party publicly denounced 
Mr. Parnell in the House of Commons, as an ad- 
venturer who was willing, for the sake of his own 
personal ambition, to drag his country through mire 
and blood. The " adventurer " was a man of high 
social position, the descendant of a brilliant and 
a famous ancestry, who was neglecting and ruining 
his once fine property for the sake of fighting 
Ireland's cause in a chill and hostile House of 
Commons. At that time the suffrage in Ireland 
was high and narrow, and it was hard indeed for 
any man to get into Parliament without the support 
of the landlord and the local aristocracy. Therefore 
the great majority of the members of the Home 
Rule party were not nationalist in any genuine 
sense ; and Mr. Parnell terrified them with his 
awful ideas of patriotic duty, and the hideous sacri- 
fices he proposed to exact. True, he was willing 
and resolved to make such sacrifices himself, — was 
already making them ; but what comfort was that 



64 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

to those who were not willing to make them ? 
What did the average Irish member, even of the 
Home Rule party, — what did he come into Parlia- 
ment for? He came because he was ambitious of 
social or political distinction ; he wanted to make 
a figure in debate. If he was a lawyer, he wanted 
to rise to the bench ; and, for an Irish lawyer, the 
vestibule to the judicial bench is almost always 
the House of Commons. If he had no political 
or public ambition, he wanted to get into London 
society ; he wanted to be invited to dinner at the 
house of some great minister ; he wanted to have 
his wife and his daughters asked to the big official 
parties at the house of the prime minister and the 
foreign secretary. Something like this was what 
he really wanted. What he said by speech or vote 
once in every session, — that is, once in every year, 
— was, that he wanted Home Rule for Ireland. 
Fancy his feelings of natural irritation against a 
young man who, himself belonging to the higher 
rank, actually did not care about his own class 
more than about any other ; who would not go to 
a Whig or Tory prime minister's dinner if he were 
besought to do so on bended knees ; who laid it 
down as a doctrine, that, while things were as they 
were, earnest Irish members ought to stand reso- 



OBSTRUCTION. 65 

lutely out of English society. Fancy with what 
scorn and anger our Irish members would repudiate, 
in the hearing of English members, any suggestion 
about "that young fellow Parnell " being entitled to 
speak for any class in Ireland ! No doubt, the scorn 
would be all the more scornful, the anger all the 
more angry, because this Irish member was feeling 
within himself a growing and an agonizing suspi- 
cion that the young fellow Parnell would be likely 
to have the country with him some day ; and where 
then would be the dinners and the balls, and the 
various delights of London society ? " It's all very 
well for Parnell," I heard an outspoken grumbler 
of this order once complain. " He hasn't any wife, 
and he hasn't any daughters ; and he could have 
all that social sort of thing if he wanted it anyhow. 
He ought to make some allowance for others." 
Naturally, the average English member took his 
opinions about Ireland from this average Irish 
member. I am not saying any thing unreasonable, 
any thing that ought even to surprise a reader, 
when I say that the men who hated Parnell most 
of all were to be found at one time in the ranks of 
that very party to which he himself belonged. 

It is not wonderful if under such conditions 
English statesmen and the English Parliament re- 



66 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

garded Parnell and his party as mere wanton mis- 
chief makers. Yet the little band whom Parnell 
inspired and led, had before them a high and a 
clear purpose ; a purpose sure in the end to bring 
benefit and blessing to England as well as to Ire- 
land. The House of Commons was overloaded 
with business. The House of Commons under- 
takes and attempts to manage much of the local 
affairs of all the counties and towns in England, 
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Not a gas-bill, a 
water-bill, a drainage-bill, a railway-bill, for the 
smallest town, but has to come before the House, 
and pass through all its stages there. I have 
sometimes wondered within myself which was the 
greater absurdity, — to assume that the House of 
Commons understood the local wants and interests 
of some great city like Manchester or Glasgow 
better than the people of Manchester and Glas- 
gow, the people who have made Manchester and 
Glasgow, or to assume that the time of the House 
of Commons and of the imperial Parliament was 
properly occupied in settling the gas and water 
arrangements of some small country hamlet. The 
House of Commons undertook to manage all this 
vast complication, this unending supply, of local busi- 
ness, and also to manage the affairs of the empire. 



OBSTRUCTION. 67 

One inevitable result of such a system was, that 
the common interests of the countries were utterly 
neglected. The railway companies, the gas com- 
panies, the great municipal corporations, managed 
to get their business pushed through Parliament 
somehow. Foreign questions, threatening to seek 
their solution by way of war, had to be debated 
and attended to. But everybody's business was 
nobody's business. The measures which concerned 
the vast majority of the people of England, Ireland, 
Scotland, and Wales, being in theory everybody's 
business, became in practice nobody's business. 
Measures of the most vital interest to the com- 
munity, measures affecting the health, the comfort, 
the well-being, the very lives, of the poor and the 
workers, were postponed session after . session, for 
ten, twenty, thirty years. Many a time have I 
heard some statesman in office introduce a measure 
which he thus described as necessary to the wel- 
fare and to the lives of some great class of workers 
in the community ; and the same measure has 
been postponed year after year, and is not yet 
passed into law. In this admitted fact, the little 
band who were led by Parnell found their cue. 
Irish interests suffered with English and Scottish 
interests ; but the Irish members maintained, that, 



68 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

speaking on behalf of Ireland, they had a special 
cause of complaint. Therefore, what they said to 
the House of Commons was, in substance, this : 
"We do not want to be in your imperial Parlia- 
ment. We ask nothing better than to be allowed 
to relieve you of all our national and local busi- 
ness, and to manage it for ourselves in an Irish 
Parliament in Dublin. We admit that the affairs 
of England and of Scotland are sacrificed to your 
present preposterous system, and we are sorry for 
it ; but if the English and Scotch members are 
willing to put up with that state of things, we 
have no right to complain. We find, that, as things 
now go, we have nothing left but to fight for our- 
selves and for our own country ; and we say to 
you, then, that if you will not give a full hearing 
to the grievances of Ireland, we will not allow 
you to get through any other business what- 
ever." 

There is a charming poem by my friend Mr. 
William Allingham, called " Laurence Bloomfield in 
Ireland," in which we find a classic story thrill- 
ingly told as an illustration of the hero's feelings 
on some subject of interest to his country. A 
Roman emperor is persecuted by the petition of 
a poor widowed woman, who prays for redress 



OBS TR UC TION. 69 

of some wrong done to her and her children. The 
great emperor is far too great, his mind is taken 
up too much with questions of imperial interest, 
to have any leisure for examining into, or even for 
reading, this poor woman's claim. One morning 
he is riding forth of his palace gates, at the head 
of his splendid retinue, and the widow comes in 
his way, right in his path, and holds up her peti- 
tion again, and implores him to read it. He will 
not read, and is about to pass scornfully on, when 
she flings herself on the ground before him, her- 
self and her little children, just in the front of his 
horse's hoofs, and she declares that if he will not 
stay and hear her prayer, he shall not pass on his 
way unless he passes over the bodies of her and 
of her children. And then, says Mr. Allingham, 
"the Roman," who must have had something of 
the truly imperial in him, "wheeled his horse 
and heard." This was the feeling with which 
Parnell and his party went into the work of 
obstruction. They were determined to fling them- 
selves down in the way of the imperial Parlia- 
ment, and stop its movement until it heard their 
claims, or passed on its way over their trampled 
bodies. 

I have spoken of the manner in which this policy 



yO IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

was misunderstood and misrepresented almost every- 
where, almost by every one in England, for a long 
time. Let me give one curious example the other 
way. At the time when the fury against obstruc- 
tion and its Irish organizers was at its highest, I 
happened to sit at a London dinner-table, next to a 
young lady, member of a family which bears a name 
renowned through all the world. She was not a 
politician, and she was not naturally, by education, 
habits, or class, in any manner of sympathy with 
Irish claims. The talk was of Irish obstruction, and 
some unpleasant things were said, which I, out of 
consideration for my hostess, affected not to hear. 
The young lady suddenly said to me, " I suppose 
that after all there is something to be said for this 
Irish obstruction. Is it not this, — is it not that 
you think you have to get the attention of a man 
who is deaf and also fast asleep ? You know you 
can only rouse him by shaking his shoulders and 
shouting in his ears ; but you do not mean to say 
that you consider shaking by the shoulders and 
shouting in the ears are the proper accompaniments 
of a civil conversation under the ordinary conditions 
of life." I assured the young lady that no mem- 
ber of the party of obstructives could have possibly 
given a better or clearer definition of the policy 



OBSTRUCTION. J I 

which the party was carrying out. We were satis- 
fied that our duty was to rouse the English public, 
deaf hitherto as regarded our claims, and just then 
fast asleep ; and we knew that there was no other 
way of getting attention than the process of shaking 
by the shoulder and shouting in the ear. We were 
convinced that if once we could get the full atten- 
tion of the public of England, Scotland, and Wales, 
we should be sure of success. The only way to obtain 
a hearing was by making the House of Commons 
itself the platform from which to speak forth our 
demands. But we knew that mere speech-making 
of the ordinary and familiar kind, even in the House 
of Commons, would never get a hearing from the 
public. We knew, on the other hand, that if we 
set about to stop all other business but ours, we 
could not fail to get the attention of the public. 
Of course we should be denounced for some 
time ; for a long time, perhaps. But sooner or 
later reasonable people would begin to ask, " What 
is the demand which these Irishmen are making ? 
What is the cause which they are advocating in 
this extraordinary and hitherto unheard-of way ? 
They are defying all authority and all public 
opinion ; they are making themselves hated ; 
they are undergoing unspeakable fatigue ; they 



72 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

are braving positive danger, — how if, after all, 
there should be some justice in their demands ? " 
If it once could come to this, we felt that all 
would be well. 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 73 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 

I WAS not one of those earliest obstructives ; the 
system had been in practice for some time before 
I had an opportunity of taking part in it. But I may 
venture to say that I was one of the very first who 
saw from the outside the policy and the objects of 
the obstructionists, and had faith in them. I came 
into the House of Commons in time to take a part 
in the struggle which abolished flogging in the army 
and navy. I may add that I was elected a member 
of the House of Commons without any reference 
whatever to obstruction ; without having given any 
promise to join Mr. Parnell's little band. I went 
into the House of Commons determined to see 
things for myself, and to give my support to what- 
ever party or section I had reason to believe was 
doing the best work for Ireland. 

I believe most of my friends took it for granted 
that my influence, such as it was, would be given to 



74 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

those who were called the moderate men : Mr. Butt, 
Mr. Shaw, and the rest. The struggle against the 
flogging system and its success satisfied me as to 
the wisdom of Mr. Parnell's policy. I remember 
that at the time Mr. Chamberlain told me it also 
satisfied him. I was convinced of the absolute sin- 
cerity and single-mindedness of Mr. Parnell ; and I 
saw in him a man of genius unmistakably sent to do 
a certain work, himself hardly conscious as yet of 
any particular mission. Never was there a human 
being who gave himself less of the ways and the 
airs of a man with a mission. Always plain, simple, 
straightforward, intensely practical, he hardly ever 
talked of any thing but the work of the very hour, 
of the very moment ; he did not seem to be looking 
forward into any far future. He did not seem to be 
capable of forming an abstract idea about any thing. 
I never heard him speak of the sun-burst, of the 
ancient glories of Ireland. I never heard him talk 
of freedom and the brotherhood of nations. I never 
heard him use a rhetorical or poetical expression of 
any kind. For all an outsider could see, Parnell's 
whole soul and sense were always absorbed in the 
fate of the particular clause of the particular bill 
which the House was then trying to discuss, and 
which he was trying to obstruct. You saw the 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 75 

heroic in him only in his absolute freedom from any 
manner of self-conceit, or self-sufficiency, or self of 
any kind. He seemed to me one of the very few- 
human beings I had ever known, in whom there was 
neither vanity nor fear. There was something al- 
most mechanical in his way of compelling himself to 
do things which he did not like to do. He always 
hated speech-making, and he was always making 
speeches — because he thought he ought to make 
them. He believed himself to be an incurably bad 
speaker; and yet he kept on speaking, as if, like 
Charles James Fox, he was determined to improve 
himself at the expense of his audience. Under all 
his manner of proud, cold, imperturbable composure, 
we who knew him knew that there was a tempera- 
ment singularly nervous and sensitive. Sometimes 
he shrank so much from the odious task of deliver- 
ing a speech, that he had to force himself to the task, 
to drive his spirit at it as one may drive a horse at 
a fence. To other men, to many other men in the 
House, speech-making was a joy, a delight : to Par- 
nell it was always an abhorred nuisance. He suc- 
ceeded, unconsciously, in improving to a surprising 
degree his style of speaking ; he made a greater 
advance in that way than perhaps any other man in 
the House during the same time. An orator in the 



y6 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

higher sense of the word he never could be, for he 
lacks imagination and poetic emotion ; but so far as 
the plainest, clearest arrangement of thought and 
argument and words can make a man eloquent, 
Parnell certainly is eloquent. Mr. Gladstone has 
said of Parnell that not even Lord Palmerston him- 
self was so consummate a master of the art of saying 
exactly what he wanted to say and not a word more. 
There are several men in Parnell's party far more 
eloquent than he ; but no man's phrases and sayings 
stamp themselves on the public mind, and will live 
as long as some of Parnell's His style of speaking 
somehow corresponds curiously with his personal 
appearance and presence. The tall form, once 
straight as that of an athlete, now prematurely 
bowed by illness and weariness ; the clear-cut, hand- 
some face, clearly cut as that of a Greek statue, and 
almost as pallid as the marble of the statue ; the 
subdued tone, and composed manner of speaking ; 
the self-control which crushes into submission all 
natural nervous excitability, and enables him, in the 
midst of no matter what conditions of surrounding 
excitement, to maintain the appearance of a cold and 
almost icy quietude, — all this harmonizes perfectly 
with the keen, direct, utterly unrhetorical style 
which sends each argument straight and sharp to its 



THE CHANGE OE LEADERSHIP. J J 

purpose, as an arrow is sent to its mark. One of the 
qualities which specially inspire Parnell's followers 
with confidence in him is his unerring power of 
forming a judgment as to the best course to be taken 
under suddenly changed conditions, and where there 
is no time for deliberate choice. Then he shows the 
instinct, the genius, of the born commander. That 
gift has never failed him in the hour of need. 

I am not engaged in writing the history of the 
Parnell movement. That work has been done in 
thorough and admirable fashion already, by my 
friend Mr T. P. O'Connor. I strongly advise every 
American who wants to know all about the move- 
ment, to trace its currents Lack to the fountain- 
head, to know the living men, as well as their 
forerunners who have ceased to live, — I strongly 
advise every such American to read Mr. O'Connor's 
book. I am only endeavoring to make clear to 
American readers, in a sort of rapid outline sketch, 
the case we have to make for Ireland, and the 
manner in which we have conducted that case in 
the imperial Parliament. Mr Parnell then broke 
away from Mr. Butt's leadership, and it became 
with every clay more and more clear that the vast 
majority of the Irish people were entirely with him. 
Butt, however, was not disturbed in his leadership, 



?8 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

— his nominal leadership. It would have been idle 
cruelty to disturb him, for every one knew that his 
life was flickering fast away. He had lived many 
lives ; he had crushed into his career too much 
work and too much pleasure. His was a strenuous 
nature, incapable of taking care of itself ; and he 
sank prematurely into death. Then Mr. William 
Shaw was elected leader, and we all hoped much 
from him. He was decidedly an able man ; he was 
an Ulster Presbyterian, who had been a minister of 
religion and a preacher, but who turned to commer- 
cial and political pursuits, and had been remarkably 
successful thus far in both. He had a somewhat 
rough and heavy manner of speaking, but he was 
a very effective speaker for all that, and had distin- 
guished himself years before in the great debates 
on Mr. Gladstone's bill for the disestablishment of 
the Irish State Church. Although he could not 
compare with Butt as orator and parliamentarian, 
yet we expected from him greater energy than Butt 
had lately shown ; and some of us believed that he 
would take warning from Butt's mistake and Butt's 
failure, and would see that the country demanded 
really energetic action from the Irish party and its 
leaders. Some of us, too, believed that it would 
be a very good thing to have behind the leader, 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 79 

occasionally pushing him on if needs were, a sec- 
tion of uncompromising and irrepressible men. It 
would, we thought, be an advantage sometimes in 
our parliamentary tactics, if our leader were able to 
say to the Government, " I am offering you the 
very maximum of our terms. You will never get 
off so cheaply again. There are men behind me 
who think I am letting you off too cheaply even 
now ; but I can give you these terms now, now, 
now, if you will accept them. If you refuse them, 
— well, you will never get the same offer again; 
and the longer you delay, the harder will be the 
terms." It seemed to me, therefore, that in having 
Shaw for our parliamentary leader, with Parnell 
behind him, we were making a very satisfactory 
arrangement. It did not turn out so. Shaw dis- 
played no energy, and very soon sank into the posi- 
tion of a merely nominal leader. He had no heart 
for the work : he could not bear to put the House 
of Commons against him ; he could not stand up 
against the bellowings and the hate of that very 
wild mob, an excited House of Commons. He did 
not in his secret soul really believe in the obstruc- 
tion policy at all ; he regarded it simply as the 
freak or the craze of the moment, designed to 
amuse the Irish people for the time, and destined 



8o IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

to pass away without having accomplished any pur- 
pose. No man with such fears and feelings could 
have made any thing of the position Shaw had come 
to hold. Certainly he made nothing of it. 

The general elections of 1880 came on the 
country suddenly, and as a surprise. Parnell was 
in the United States, raising money for the relief 
of the Irish peasantry, who were suffering from a 
winter of agricultural failure and distress ; raising 
money, also, to carry on our political agitation in 
the House of Commons. He hurried home, and 
flung himself into the electoral campaign. He 
took the bold position of a leader, and he put for- 
ward his own candidates, in one or two instances 
against the candidates approved of and supported 
by Mr. Shaw. Despite all the influences against 
him, and the restricted nature of the Irish suf- 
frage, he was successful beyond the utmost hopes 
of his followers. He turned out some of the 
greatest and most powerful Irish landlords, Liberal 
as well as Tory, and put in followers of his own 
in their places. Some of the best, the ablest, the 
most eloquent, the most devoted men of the Irish 
nationalist party, came into Parliament for the 
first time in this early part of 1880. Mr. Sexton, 
Mr. T. P. O'Connor, Mr. James O'Kelly, Mr. T. 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 8r 

D. Sullivan, Mr. Leamy, were among them. Mr. 
Parnell could count on a considerable number of 
followers, at once capable and devoted. No coun- 
try ever had better men to serve her. Still the 
immediate effect of the elections was to split the 
party into two. It came about in this way : Our 
resolve, after Butt's death, was to elect, at the 
opening of every session, a chairman and vice- 
chairman. We were not going to have any more 
leaders in perpetuity. The newer and more earnest 
men among the new-comers were of opinion, — and 
so, indeed, were some of the old guard as well, — 
that Mr. Shaw could no longer be endured as a 
leader ; and they proposed at once to give the title 
of leader to the man who had shown that he could 
lead, — to Parnell himself. Parnell was not in 
favor of this step. He did not wish to be leader. 
He thought the time had not come ; that he was 
too young a man for such a position. His idea 
was that Mr. Shaw would have to be displaced, 
but that another member of the party, not Par- 
nell, should be elected chairman. I, for one, was 
strongly opposed to this, and told Parnell privately 
that if there was to be any change I would myself 
insist on proposing him for chairman, if no one 
else did. But I told him, too, that I personally 



82 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

thought it would be better at that moment to 
leave things as they were. Things, however, could 
not be left as they were. I think now that I was 
mistaken in my opinion at the time. Mr. Shaw 
was deposed, and Mr. Parnell was elected, not, 
however, by a very large majority ; and Mr. Shaw, 
and nearly all of those who supported him, passed 
from our side, and went over into the ranks of 
our enemies. All those who were called, and who 
delighted to be called, " the moderate men," were 
gone from among us ; were gone to strengthen 
the hands of our enemies. 

Of our enemies ? — after the general elections of 
1880? — our enemies? Did not Gladstone come 
into power? Was he not the prime minister of 
England, with Sir Charles Dilke and Joseph Cham- 
berlain members of his administration ? Where, 
then, were the enemies in power? The truth is, 
that the domestic crisis in our little party was 
but an incident of another and a greater crisis. 
We had helped the Liberals into office ; we had 
agitated for them, struggled for them, given them 
the benefit of the Irish vote everywhere. We 
were satisfied that Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals 
would give the fullest and fairest hearing to every 
demand the Irish national representatives had to 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 83 

make. We knew — some of us did, at least — 
that Mr. Gladstone had in his heart much sym- 
pathy with the national aspiration, and that he 
only wanted jt o be convinced of the reasonableness 
and the practical nature of the demand for Home 
Rule. He wanted to be convinced of two things, 
— first, that the demand was a really national 
demand ; and, next, that a practicable scheme of 
Home Rule could be made out, which would give 
Ireland the right to manage her own affairs, while 
preserving all the integrity of the imperial system. 
Mr. Gladstone wanted to have his doubts removed 
on these two points ; and that done, he would be 
a Home Ruler. No one can say that he was not 
perfectly right in suspending his judgment while 
these doubts remained yet unsolved. He was only 
following out the clear line of duty for any English 
statesman. But the secession from the ranks of 
the Irish party unquestionably went far to con- 
firm both his doubts. The men who seceded with 
Mr. Shaw were, as a rule, all highly respectable 
men. They were men of good position ; they 
were, on an average, older and more mature than 
our men. Some of them were men of undoubted 
ability and sincerity ; some had done good work 
in Ireland and for Ireland. Not a few, however, 



84 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

were mere Whig place-hunters of the old-fashioned 
order. When these men all left us and turned 
against us, when they made it only too evident 
that they had no particular zeal for that Home 
Rule cause which they still professed to profess, — 
if I may use such a phrase, — then, of course, it 
was not surprising that Mr. Gladstone should find 
his doubts as to the genuine popularity of the 
Home Rule movement gaining new force. Nor 
would it have been surprising, if, accepting as true 
the assertions of Mr. Shaw and his friends, that the 
policy of the obstructives was only a new toy to 
amuse the country for a brief season, and then to be 
thrown aside, Mr. Gladstone should have thought 
in his secret heart that a country which could 
be thus beguiled was hardly ripe for the work of 
national self-government. 

Mr. Shaw and his friends did not separate them- 
selves from us on the ground merely that we had 
not elected Mr. Shaw as our leader. Indeed, some 
four or five of those who had voted for Shaw as 
chairman of the party, proved themselves afterwards 
to be among the sincerest and most devoted follow- 
ers of Mr. Parnell's policy. Mr. Shaw and his col- 
leagues soon found other reason for open severance 
from us. In the House of Commons, as most 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 85 

Americans know, the political views of the various 
sections of men are denoted by the places in which 
they sit. There are two broad and obvious distinc- 
tions : the ministerial side of the House, and the 
opposition side. The members of the government, 
and those who support them, sit on the right hand 
of Mr. Speaker ; the opposition, on his left. But 
then there is also an important subdivision of 
benches and of men. Half-way down the benches 
on either side, runs a transverse passage from the 
side wall to the floor of the House, and this passage 
is called the gangway. " Below the gangway " is a 
phrase of real political significance in the House of 
Commons, and in English political life. The men 
who sit below the gangway are considered to be 
more or less independent in their action. Those 
who sit below the gangway on the ministerial side 
are indeed supporters of the ministry and the min- 
isterial policy, but they do not give themselves out 
as thick-and-thin supporters ; they claim, or are at 
all events traditionally understood to claim, a certain 
right of private judgment. In the same way the 
men who sit below the gangway on the side of oppo- 
sition profess a general allegiance to the leaders 
of opposition, but do not acknowledge themselves 
bound to follow that leadership whithersoever it may 



86 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

think fit to go. Naturally this " below the gang- 
way " independence is much more of a reality among 
the Liberals than among the Tories. It is one of the 
conditions of a Liberal party's existence, that some 
of" its members should wish to go faster and farther 
than others. But the ordinary duty of a Tory 
party is merely to resist change, and there is there- 
fore little occasion or opportunity for independ- 
ence of judgment. Now, then, we were to have a 
change of government, and consequently a general 
change of places, in the House of Commons. The 
Liberals, who had been sitting in opposition, would 
cross the floor to the right of Mr. Speaker. The 
Conservatives were doomed to take their places 
on his left, in what is called the cold shade of 
opposition. Where were the Irish members to 
sit ? 

Where, of course, — Mr. Shaw and his friends 
contended, — but with their allies the Liberals, led 
by Mr. Gladstone ? " We have brought them back 
to office, and to power ; they are pledged to do great 
things for Ireland. Are we going to draw away 
from them, and to sit with our natural enemies, 
the Tory opposition ? " This seemed at first a 
reasonable declaration. But there was another side 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 87 

to the question. " We, the Irish nationalist mem- 
bers," said the followers of Mr. Parnell, — "we rep- 
resent a principle, an idea, not a mere party. We 
are in opposition to every English government 
which does not pledge itself to Home Rule. We 
can make no distinction of persons in that regard. 
We have great faith in Mr. Gladstone ; but neither 
he nor any of his administration has made one single 
public profession of sympathy with Home Rule. 
Some of the individual men are with us, we know, 
but they have made, as yet, no public declaration of 
that kind ; and there are many of Mr. Gladstone's 
colleagues who are not in the least likely to have 
any manner of sympathy with our cause. Who 
believes, for instance, that the Marquis of Harting- 
ton is in favor of Home Rule ? Why, then, should 
we attach ourselves to the tail of the Liberal party ? 
Our place is still, and probably will be for a long 
time to come, on the benches of opposition. Were 
Mr. Gladstone's Government to pass every measure 
of minor reform for Ireland which Irish members 
could ask, we must still stand out in resolute atti- 
tude of formal opposition, so long as that Govern- 
ment denies us our supreme national claim. We 
must maintain the unbroken continuity of that 



88 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

national protest which Ireland has been making for 
eighty years against the suppression of her national 
Parliament. To attach ourselves now to the Liberal 
party, to consent to renounce our attitude of oppo- 
sition, would be to haul down the national flag, to 
surrender the national principle." 

That was the view which prevailed with the 
friends and followers of Mr. Parnell. Mr. Shaw 
and his companions held the other view. We re- 
mained in our old places on the opposition benches. 
They crossed the floor, and sat with the ministe- 
rialists. The split was complete. One or two true 
men who at first went with Shaw, believing him 
to be right, afterwards changed their minds for 
good and honest reason, and came back to us, and 
staid with us ; but, save for these exceptions, the 
division was final. Mr. Shaw and his section were 
thenceforth our enemies. In many a crisis in the 
dark years that followed, I have remembered the 
words of Macbeth, and have thought how different 
might have been some of our struggles against 
coercion, if only we had the full strength of our 
party with us : — 

"Were they not forced with those that should be ours, 
We might have met them dareful, beard to beard, 
And beat them backward home." 



THE CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP. 89 

But they left us at our hour of need ; and a heavy- 
penalty they had to pay for it afterwards, when 
Ireland got her chance of pronouncing judgment 
upon them. 



90 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 



CHAPTER VI. 

WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 

T^7E were waiting to see what the Government 
* * would do. We had no expectation of any 
movement being made in the direction of Home 
Rule as yet ; but we were anxious about the land 
question. There had been a very severe winter in 
Ireland, and, in consequence, much distress. During 
that winter the famous Land League was established 
by Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt. The landlord party 
were shrieking aloud against the Land League, and 
calling on the castle authorities in Dublin to put it 
down. During the later months of the Tory Gov- 
ernment there had been a ridiculous attempt at a 
state prosecution of Parnell and several of his col- 
leagues, — a prosecution which utterly broke down. 
Now that the Liberals were in office, we had great 
expectations of a good land bill ; some measure to 
prevent unjust and wanton evictions, and to prepare 
the way for the establishment of a great system of 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 9 1 

peasant proprietary. Mr. Gladstone had intrusted 
the management of Irish affairs to the late Mr. 
W. E. Forster. The lord-lieutenant of Ireland, 
Lord Cowper, was not a man of any statesmanlike 
capacity ; and Mr. Forster as chief secretary for Ire- 
land — chief secretary to the lord-lieutenant is the 
exact title of the office — had Ireland in his own 
hands. We Irishmen were all well pleased with 
the appointment. Mr. Forster, when a young man, 
became known to the people of Ireland by the efforts 
which he made, in co-operation with his father, to 
relieve the famine-stricken peasantry in 1846 and 
1847. If I remember rightly, the elder Forster 
died in Ireland at the time. We all felt sure that 
Mr. Forster's sympathies would go cordially with 
the Irish people. The first session of the new Gov- 
ernment was short ; for, by the time the elections 
were over, the spring had well-nigh gone by. We 
did not suppose the Government could do much to 
help us, that session. On our urgency they brought 
in a short bill to stay evictions for the time ; but the 
House of Lords — a house of landlords — promptly 
threw it out. The session came to an end. When 
Parliament was called together in 1881, we were 
informed that the Government intended to bring in 
a land bill and a coercion bill ; and that the coercion 



92 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

bill was to come first. The Radical Government was 
to inaugurate its work in Ireland by a coercion bill. 
This was the advice of Mr. Forster : he insisted, as 
a condition of his remaining in office, that he must 
be allowed to have a stern coercion measure to 
begin with. I do not believe there is any one 
rational man in English politics now who does not 
admit that Mr. Forster's policy was a fatal blunder. 
The announcement was met with a cry of disap- 
pointment and anger from the Irish people. The 
Government had declared war against us. We, for 
our part, declared war against the Government. 
Our hopes from the Liberal alliance were gone. We 
had no course left but to fight the coercion bill at 
every stage and step and by every means which the 
Constitution and the rules of Parliament put in our 
power. Mr. Forster, who had begun, I am satisfied, 
in the best spirit towards the Irish people, seemed 
to have come to hate them. He had misunderstood 
them from the first. He was apparently under the 
impression that they would endure meekly a coer- 
cion bill, if only he were to speak them fair mean- 
time, and promise them that a land bill should follow. 
He did not understand that they would naturally 
resent a coercion bill more bitterly if it came from 
the hands of those whom they had believed to be 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 93 

their friends, than if it came from those whom they 
knew to be their enemies. Even if the Government 
had brought in the land bill first and the coercion 
bill afterwards, there might have been some hope 
of continued amity ; but, as it was, Mr. Forster's 
advice proved fatal. 

I would ask my American readers to consider 
what was then the position of Mr. Parnell's party. 
We were left alone to front the situation, and take 
our resolve. Our resolve was soon taken : we were 
bound, at any risk, to resist the passing of the 
coercion bill. There was really no excuse for such 
a measure. Ireland was disturbed in certain dis- 
tricts, — disturbed by merely agrarian disturbance, 
the trouble all arising out of the failure, or partial 
failure, of the crops, and the frequent and cruel 
evictions. The very knowledge that Mr. Gladstone 
was going to bring in a land bill for the benefit of 
the tenants and the restraint of the landlord's odious 
power was, for the present, only a fresh stimulus to 
the evicting and rack-renting land-owners to make 
hay while their sinister sun yet shone ; to screw all 
they could out of the soil and the tenants while yet 
the screw was fully theirs to use. Therefore the 
landlord evicted, and the evicted man sometimes 
had his wild revenge ; but the ordinary law was 



94 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

quite strong enough for any cases with which law 
could deal. There were cases with which law could 
not deal. When a harsh landlord was fired at from 
behind a hedge, — when he was killed even, — it 
was sometimes found impossible to get any evi- 
dence on which to convict. Even those who hated 
the deed sometimes felt in their own persons so 
keen a perception of the nature of the provocation 
as to be unwilling to give up the breaker of the law 
to justice. All this is very deplorable ; but all this 
is in human nature, and would happen anywhere 
under the like conditions ; but in cases of that kind 
there was no use of a coercion act. A coercion act 
could not authorize any judge and jury to declare a 
man guilty when there was no evidence against him ; 
and the sympathy with the crime came from just the 
same sources as the crime itself, — the rack-rent and 
the eviction. We felt all this ; and we felt that all 
the strength we had must be given to the resistance 
of coercion. Ireland had always been governed by 
coercion. We saw that the time had come to resist 
any more coercion measures, even though they came 
from men declaring themselves our friends, and de- 
claring, too, that coercion was a necessary prelimi- 
nary to land reform. If you cannot govern Ireland 
without coercion, we said, then, in Heaven's name, 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 95 

cease to try to govern at all. You confess your 
own incapacity to govern the country, by your very 
demand for this measure, without which you say the 
country cannot be governed. Cannot be governed ? 
Well, perhaps not; not by you. Give us a trial: let 
Irishmen manage their own domestic affairs for 
themselves, and we shall see whether Ireland can- 
not be ruled without coercion bills. 

We were then about twenty strong, all told ; and 
the House of Commons contains some six hundred 
and fifty members. With the exception of some 
half a dozen stout English Radicals who were always 
on our side, the whole House was against us. Every 
man's hand was against us, but I am bound to 
admit that our hand was against every man. We 
made a great many speeches in those days. The 
House of Commons did not always listen to us, 
but we made our speeches all the same. We kept 
the House sitting through long and weary nights ; 
we kept the House sitting once from four o'clock 
on the Monday afternoon until six o'clock on the 
following Wednesday evening, no intermission of 
debate all that time. We went in for open and 
avowed obstruction ; we declared that, so long as 
we could, we would resist the Coercion Bill. Then 
they tried to amend their procedure, and made all 



96 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

sorts of new rules to introduce a closure, meant, of 
course, only for the Irish members, — I mean those 
who called themselves emphatically the Irish mem- 
bers. Once or twice the Speaker accomplished 
a very coup d'etat, and brought a long debate to 
a sudden close. We were each of us suspended 
from the service of the House. We were all of us 
expelled from the House in a body on one memor- 
able evening ; each of us refusing to leave the 
House until the sergeant-at-arms had gone through 
the formula of using force to carry out the mandate 
of the majority. Of course we came back again 
next day, or on whatever day the sentence of sus- 
pension expired ; and we went on with our work of 
obstruction as if nothing had happened. We were 
doing just what we wanted to do ; we were arous- 
ing the attention of England and Scotland and the 
civilized world. Our cause was gaining every day 
in Ireland, and among the Irish in America and 
Australia. Whenever chance threw an election in 
our way by the promotion, resignation, or death of 
some Whig Irish member, we sent our own can- 
didate forward, and he was elected by an over- 
whelming majority if the opponents ventured on a 
contest. Great meetings were being held all over 
Ireland, which we attended as often as we could ; 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCT/ON. g? 

and we saw with eur own eyes that the whole 
country was rallying to our side. We felt safe 
and tranquil ; we knew that Ireland was with us ; 
we said to ourselves, "Yet a little, and England, 
Scotland, and Wales will be with us too." 

Which came to pass. In the old days when we 
were as yet only seven or eight, we used to take 
a great many divisions in the House of Commons. 
A division in the House of Commons is a process 
which occupies some fifteen or twenty minutes in its 
operation. If an Irish member happened to differ 
very often in the course of a sitting from the opinion 
of the majority of the House, and chose to give 
expression and form to his differing opinion through 
the constitutional and altogether legitimate medium 
of a division, the result would at least be, that some 
intervals of relief were secured for outworn orators 
on the Parnellite benches. A division in the House 
of Commons is not taken in the same way as a 
division in any American legislative chamber of 
which I know any thing. In the House of Com- 
mons the plan is, that all those who vote "aye" 
pass through one lobby, and all who vote " no " pass 
through the other. The lobbies are long, spacious 
corridors or ante-rooms, running each one the whole 
length of the chamber itself; the two belt round 



98 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

the chamber like a girdle, and each lobby will hold 
some hundreds of men. Now, when we took a 
division in those old days, we seven or eight Irish- 
men passed into one lobby, and the whole House of 
Commons streamed down the other. We had in the 
House at that time a genial, not to say jovial, Irish 
member, a man who, although of the landlord class, 
very often gave us his sympathy and his vote. He 
was not much good at the making of speeches, and 
so, I suppose, he thought he was bound to keep up 
our spirits by his odd humors and his pleasant ways. 
Sometimes when we were going through the division 
lobby, we poor forlorn seven or eight dragging our 
slow footsteps along that lengthy, lonely corridor, 
while the whole House of Commons was streaming 
blithely down the other lobby, our good-humored 
friend would appear in front of us, and waving his 
right arm encouragingly over his head would exclaim 
in the most cheery tone, " Well, boys, Jiere we are 
again in our thousands ! " Or some other time while 
the same process was going on, our friend would be 
seen close up to the still-unopened door of the divis- 
ion lobby at the farther end, and he would all of a 
sudden come to a stand, and throw his arms wildly 
out behind him, and he would be heard to cry in 
panic-stricken voice, " Keep back, boys ! Don't be 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 99 

crushing on in that way ! There's room enough for 
us all ! I tell you we'll all get through in time, every 
one ; only don't crush us against the doors." 

Our good-humored friend is not now in the House 
of Commons or in public life. I thought of him a 
good deal one memorable morning in the House of 
Commons in the session of 1886. I thought of him ; 
and it was borne in upon my mind, that if he were 
then a member of Parliament he might have seen 
his whimsical fantasy actually turned to reality ; he 
might have found himself in a fair way to be crushed 
against the door of that same lobby by the crowd of 
eager, impassioned men, hurrying to record their 
votes for Home Rule. That was on a memorable 
night, or rather morning, in the session of 1886, 
when I found myself passing down that same lobby, 
no longer one of a little group of seven or eight 
Home Rulers, but one of a party of three hundred 
and eleven Home Rulers led by Mr. Gladstone 
himself. What had brought about that marvellous 
change in so short a space of time ? What, indeed, 
under Heaven, but our much-misunderstood, much- 
ridiculed, much-denounced obstruction ? We had 
done what we said we would do and could do : we 
had roused the whole mind and heart of true British 
liberalism to a recognition of the justice of our case. 



100 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

We knew that if we could only get a hearing, we 
must win our cause ; and we persevered until we got 
a hearing. Mr. Gladstone's recent Reform Bill, on 
which Liberals and Tories were at last united, — the 
Tories helping only of course because they could not 
hinder, and wanted to try to make the best of things 
for their own sakes, — that Reform Bill gave to the 
two islands a representation broader and better than 
they ever had before. It gave the franchise to some 
two millions of new voters. In Ireland it enabled 
the great mass of the population for the first time to 
enforce their political convictions by a vote. The 
result in Ireland was that we carried eighty-six of 
the constituencies out of the whole hundred and 
three. It may be pointed out, too, that there are 
only one hundred and one seats which we could 
possibly have contested. The University of Dublin 
has two representatives in the House of Commons ; 
but then, the University of Dublin elects by virtue 
of its own peculiar academic franchise, with which 
the general public have nothing to do. There 
were, therefore, really one hundred and one seats 
to be contested ; and out of these hundred and 
one seats, the nationalist party captured eighty-six. 
Not merely did they carry all these seats, but in 
almost every case in which there was a contest the 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 10 1 

nationalists won by enormous and overwhelming 
majorities. As for the "nominal Home" Rulers," 
the men who had fallen away from us in the hour 
of danger and darkness, their fate was dramatic, 
was instructive. They simply disappeared. Not 
one of them, no, not one, was sent to Parliament 
again by an Irish constituency. There, then, was 
the answer given to one of Mr. Gladstone's ques- 
tions, the settlement of one of his doubts. The 
nationalists did, then, unquestionably, speak with 
the voice and in the name of the Irish people. 
The Irish people did deliberately demand Home 
Rule. Mr. Gladstone accepted the will of the Irish 
people ; and he brought in his great measure to 
give to the Irish people the right of making laws 
for Ireland. His scheme was defeated by a com- 
bination of renegade Liberals with the Tory oppo- 
sition ; and he appealed to the country, and was 
defeated at the elections, and the Tories came into 
office. But let us examine a little into the nature 
of the defeat. In Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 
the great majority of the voters voted for Glad- 
stone and Home Rule. It would be hardly too 
much to say that Ireland, Scotland, and Wales 
went solid for Gladstone and Home Rule. It was 
in England that Gladstone and Home Rule were 



102 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

defeated. But let us see how they were defeated, 
even in England. I am strongly of opinion, that, 
although the majority of English votes was against 
Gladstone, the majority of English voters was with 
him, even in that election where England defeated 
him. This will perhaps seem paradoxical and unin- 
telligible to an American reader, at first ; but I 
shall make it quite clear and reasonable. In Eng- 
land, if a man have the qualification in several 
constituencies, he can give a separate vote in each 
of these constituencies. We do not take our elec- 
tions as America does, all on the same day. We 
spread our general elections over several weeks. 
If we give a man the right to record several votes, 
we give him, also, plenty of time to go up and 
down the country, and to drop his various ballot- 
papers into so many different ballot-boxes. We 
take care of our men of property in England ; for, 
of course, only property can confer this plurality of 
vote. A man has two or three country residences, 
each in a different electoral division ; he can vote 
in each of these electoral divisions. He has a 
town-house in London ; he can vote in that divis- 
ion of London also. Perhaps he is a banker or a 
lawyer, having offices or chambers in the City of 
London proper ; very good, then he has his vote 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. 103 

for the City of London election. A friend of my 
own, a stanch Conservative, told me that at the 
elections which overthrew Mr. Gladstone, he him- 
self gave eight separate votes against Gladstone and 
Home Rule. My friend is not a territorial mag- 
nate ; only a man of some position and means, who 
has a town-house and a country-house, a place of 
business in the city of London proper, a manufac- 
tory in a county town, and a residence near the 
manufactory, and two or three small places of resi- 
dence, shooting-boxes and such like, in different 
parts of the country. These places altogether made 
him the possessor of eight votes ; and, acting after 
his lights like a true Conservative, he gave (and 
small blame to him) his eight votes against Glad- 
stone and Home Rule. But there are thousands 
of men in the country far richer than he, and with 
a wider range of qualifications entitling them to 
give separate votes. It will naturally be asked, 
Why did not Gladstone's followers do the same ? 
Was not the law the same for them as for the 
others ? Undoubtedly the law was the same for 
them as for the others ; but observe who the Glad- 
stonians were, and who the others. Who were 
the men who mainly supported Gladstone in Eng- 
land ? Who were they who formed the rank and 



104 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

file of his brave and true-hearted army ? Why, 
who, of course, but the members of the English 
democratic party, the workers of all kinds, the arti- 
sans in the towns, the peasants on the fields in the 
counties ? These were the men who followed Glad- 
stone, and there was no plurality of votes for them. 
Show me the English artisan or English peasant 
who has a vote here and a vote there, and I will 
show you an English artisan who has a shooting- 
lodge in the Highlands, and an English peasant 
who has a town residence in Belgravia. No, the 
artisans and the peasants do not as a rule amass 
property, and acquire various qualifications ; one 
man, one vote, is the law of life for them. Who 
were against Gladstone ? Why, of course, in the 
main, the aristocrats and the plutocrats, the men 
of property and of many votes. Some time we shall 
set this right in England, and allow no man to have 
more than one vote. But so far it has not been 
set right, and it overthrew Mr. Gladstone at the 
last elections. I think my American readers will 
now . understand the meaning of my assertion that, 
while in those elections the majority of English 
votes was against Mr. Gladstone, the majority of 
English voters was in his favor. 

This, then, we have accomplished for Home Rule. 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION: 105 

We have made it not merely the question of an 
Irish party, but the question of Ireland ; and not 
the question of Ireland merely, but the question 
of all the liberalism of the two islands. Already 
Mr. Gladstone has done what no statesman ever 
succeeded in doing before, — he has reconciled 
the English and the Irish people. How many 
of us had through years and years longed and 
prayed for such a reconciliation, but hardly dared 
to hope for it, or, at least, to think that it could 
come to pass ! And, now behold, it has come to 
pass, and by means of the Home Rule question. 
The whole democracy of the two islands are made 
into one party. When William O'Brien goes down 
from Dublin to take his trial in Cork County, he 
is welcomed at every station by crowds who cheer 
for " William O'Brien and the English people." 
The English members of Parliament, and demo- 
cratic delegates, pour over to Ireland, and speak at 
great meetings of the national league. Labouchere ; 
Jacob Bright, brother of John Bright ; Brunner ; 
Philip Stanhope, brother of Tory Earl Stanhope 
and of Edward Stanhope, war minister in the 
present Tory Government ; Conybeare ; Professor 
Stuart; Pickersgill, — these, and numbers of other 
conspicuous Radical members of Parliament, speak 



106 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

up for Home Rule on Irish national platforms, 
as warmly and strongly as any Irishman could do. 
Wilfrid Blunt, who secured the defence of Arabi 
Pasha; Thorold Rogers, whose name is as well 
known in America as in England, — rouse up Irish 
audiences to a fervor which could be excelled by 
no Irish speaker. English ladies are there too, 
are present at evictions, and attend open-air meet- 
ings. English ladies were present at the Mitchells- 
town meeting, and could only by the earnest per- 
suasions of Mr. Dillon and Mr. Labouchere and 
Mr. Brunner, be prevailed upon to go under shelter 
when the police began their wanton and outrageous 
fusillade. One of these ladies tells, with tears in her 
eyes, how a tall Tipperary man made his way up to 
the side of her carriage, and said, " English ladies, 
you have trusted yourselves to the protection of 
Tipperary boys, and there isn't one of us here who 
won't die before a hair of your heads is touched." 
Among the English ladies who went to Ireland 
to testify to her sympathy with the Irish cause, 
was Miss Cobden, the daughter of John Bright's 
old friend and companion-in-arms, Richard Cobden. 
I wonder what John Bright felt when he read the 
announcement, and if he realized all the full bearing 
of the fact upon his own altered position. Alas for 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCT/O.V. IO? 

our old apostle of popular right, — alas for John 
Bright ! Alas, too, that a purely personal offence, 
or supposed offence, should have estranged him 
from the cause of Ireland ! Let us pass him over 
with the charity of silence. Among the English 
women who sympathize with the Irish national 
cause, none are more earnest than the Countess 
Russell, widow of the great Earl Russell, the Lord 
John Russell of the first Reform Bill, and her 
daughter Lady Agatha Russell. 

The coming of Home Rule for Ireland is as 
certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun. The split 
in the Liberal party is not only a familiar accom- 
paniment of a great reform movement, but it is 
the invariable and inevitable accompaniment of 
every such movement. There was a split in the 
Liberal party on the reform question in 1830; 
there was a split in the Liberal party in i860, 
when Lord John Russell brought on his new Re- 
form Bill, and the seceders joined the Tories, and 
for the vime defeated the bill. When Lord Russell 
and Mr. Gladstone brought in their Reform Bill in 
1866, there was another split in the Liberal party, 
— the famous Cave of Adullam secession, — led by 
a far abler man than Mr. Chamberlain, — the pres- 
ent forgotten Lord Sherbrooke, — then the famous 



108 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

Mr. Robert Lowe. Some of the peers and mem- 
bers of the House of Commons who were in that 
secession are in the present secession. What hap- 
pened then ? The secession delayed reform by 
just one year. But when the reform came, it 
came from Mr. Disraeli, and was of a much more 
advanced character than any thing that Mr. Glad 
stone and Mr. Bright had ventured to propose. 
And this brings us to another of the possibilities 
in the present crisis. We may get Home Rule 
from the Tories. The familiar movement of British 
political life is the education of the Tories up to 
that point when, seeing a certain reform inevitable, 
they come to the conclusion that, having got into 
office by opposing it, they had better keep in office 
by adopting it. Liberal statesmen start a Liberal 
policy. They teach it ; they fight for it ; they 
bring in measures to establish it ; they know they 
have the country with them ; but as yet they have 
not the House of Commons, and they are defeated, 
and they go out of office, and the Tories come in. 
Then; if the Tory leader be any thing of a states- 
man, he quickly finds out that the cause is grow- 
ing and gaining in the country, that it is getting 
more and more to have the sympathy of the peo- 
ple, and that it must win before long. Thereupon 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. IO9 

he is forced to a decision. If he be a very high- 
minded or scrupulous sort of man, he declares 
that he never can consent to adopt while in office 
a measure which he fought against when out of 
office, which he obtained office by opposing. So 
he resigns, and leaves any one who will to pro- 
pitiate public opinion. The present Lord Salisbury 
has done this more than once already. But the 
idea of Mr. Disraeli was rather to accept the inev- 
itable ; not to trouble one's self overmuch about 
consistency ; and, if the people wanted reform, to 
give them the reform they wanted. This was the 
policy of Tory statesmen before Mr. Disraeli's 
time. Catholic emancipation was first fiercely and 
furiously resisted by the Tories ; it was at last 
carried into legislation by the Tories. We have 
seen what Mr. Disraeli did with reform in 1867. 
Having succeeded, with the help of the Liberal 
secessionists, in turning Lord Russell and Mr. 
Gladstone out of office in 1866, he succeeded to 
their place ; and he brought in, and carried, a much 
more expanded measure of reform in 1867. Now, 
the Tories may tire of their efforts to govern Ire- 
land by a policy of coercion. They may find that 
they cannot do it. They may begin to shrink 
from the responsibility for too much shedding of 



IIO IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

blood. They may begin to see that Home Rule 
is inevitable. Some of them may say, "That being 
so, we prefer to retire from office altogether." 
Others may say, "If it has to be done, why should 
we not stay in office and do it?" So there might 
be a re -organized Tory cabinet. Lord Randolph 
Churchill might come back to power. If he did, 
and if he saw any advantage in adopting the cause 
of Home Rule, he would not be deterred from doing 
so by the fact that he has lately been denouncing 
Home Rule. Why should he ? He was not de- 
terred from denouncing Home Rule by the fact 
that he had, but a short time before, been advo- 
cating Home Rule. I suppose this sort of thing 
seems strange and shocking to a foreign reader. 
I suppose our system of government by party does 
not bring with it unmixed blessing and credit. 
But there it is ; and we have not, for the present, 
any thing to put in its place. And while men 
remain men, some of them will always be found 
ready to prefer office to dull, pedantic consistency, 
and to make up their mind that if anybody is to 
have the benefit of introducing a certain measure, 
they might as well have the benefit of doing so, 
even although they enjoyed the benefit of oppos- 
ing and defeating it on a former occasion. 



WHAT CAME OF OBSTRUCTION. Ill 

I need hardly say that the ardent hope of the 
whole Irish people, and of all English Radicals, 
is, that the great man who has risked and sacri- 
ficed so much in the cause of Home Rule, should 
be allowed by Providence to crown his noble career 
by carrying it to success. We shall have Home 
Rule. We want it from the hands of Mr. Glad- 
stone, — " welcome from any, twofold blest from 
him." 



112 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. 

I HAVE often been asked, and in perfect good 
faith, by English friends who were not indis- 
posed to turn with sympathy to the Irish cause, 
What security could you give for the rights of the 
Protestant minority under an Irish national Parlia- 
ment ? Well, I should say, to begin with, that the 
Irish Catholics are willing to give every statutable 
security for the protection of the Protestant minority 
that the wit of man can devise. We said this 
during the debates on Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule 
measure. " Give us a statutory Parliament, and put 
into the statute that creates the Parliament any 
security you will for the protection of the Protest- 
ant minority, and we shall accept it ; for we wish 
the Protestants to be protected, as well as you do." 
But I say with the utmost sincerity, that I do not 
believe any statutory protection would really be 
needed. What security would there be under an 



THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. 113 

Irish national Parliament for the protection of the 
rights of the Protestant minority ? What security 
for the rights of the men whose co-religionists have 
at all times, and in the darkest hours of our Irish 
national history, taken the most active and the most 
splendid part in the championship of the national 
cause ? Why, I say that if the living were unable 
to protect the Irish Protestants, the dead in their 
graves would prove their ample shield and shelter. 
A Roman poet has pictured Hannibal as guarded 
at his table against the attempts of his enemies 
by the shadows of his great victories. The Irish 
Protestant is forever guarded in Ireland by the 
shadows of his great co-religionists who struggled 
and sacrificed and died for the national cause. The 
very names upon the gravestones — the one grave- 
stone in Dublin City which is purposely left with- 
out a name — would be a protection better than 
any statute law. The names on the tombs of Wolfe 
Tone and Edward Fitzgerald and Thomas Addis 
Emmet and Hamilton Rowan and Smith O'Brien 
and Thomas Davis and John Mitchell and John 
Martin, — that tomb unmarked by a name which 
covers the remains of Robert Emmet, — these 
would alone be warrant for the safety of Protest- 
ants in Ireland. Time has added to these the 



114 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

name of Isaac Butt ; will add to them the name of 
Charles Stewart Parnell. Many an Irish Catholic 
is generously jealous of the noble part which his 
Protestant fellow-countrymen have taken in the 
struggle for the Irish national cause. Does any 
rational man really think that the services of these 
patriots could ever be forgotten in Ireland ? Does 
any one suppose that Irishmen are so unlike all 
other human beings, that they would make use of 
their legislative freedom to oppress the co-religion- 
ists of the very men who won that legislative inde- 
pendence for them ? No ; until you can efface from 
the memory of Ireland all record of her past his- 
tory, until you can sponge out of the Irish heart 
that feeling of gratitude which used to be thought 
its peculiar characteristic, there will never be needed 
any protection for the Irish Protestant other than 
that which is given by the gratitude and the sym- 
pathy and the love of his Irish Catholic fellow- 
subject and brother. 

In truth, they curiously misunderstand the Irish 
cause who fancy it has any thing to do with the 
struggles of sect against sect. The clearest, the 
most striking, evidences can be given the other 
way. Since the Home Rule parliamentary party, 
under that name, has existed, it has had three 



THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. 1 1 5 

leaders. The Home Rule party has always been 
essentially democratic in its constitution, and it 
elects its leaders by the vote of a majority. The 
first leader chosen was Mr. Isaac Butt, an Episco- 
palian Protestant. When Mr. Butt died, we elected 
— I was then myself a member of the party — Mr. 
William Shaw, an Ulster Presbyterian, to succeed 
him. After it had become plain that Mr. Shaw was 
not advanced enough for the position, we elected 
in his place a Protestant Episcopalian, in the per- 
son of Mr. Parnell. Thus far the party, the great 
majority of which are Catholics, never had a Catho- 
lic leader. More than that, it never had a Catholic 
leader proposed for its acceptance. We elect our 
leader every year. At the opening of each session 
some one proposes that this one or that be elected 
chairman of the party ; that is, leader. Anybody 
can propose any other name. No Catholic name 
ever was proposed or suggested. I think this is 
tolerably clear evidence that there is not much 
sectarian feeling in the party or in the country. 
Of course it would be said that of late years Mr. 
Parnell's qualifications are so surpassing, that no 
fervor of Catholic bigotry could think of dispos- 
sessing him. Quite true ; but there was a time 
when the party were not so certain, when the 



Il6 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

world was not so certain, of Mr. Parnell's qualifi- 
cations ; when he was new and untried ; when 
some thought his parliamentary policy all a mistake. 
There was the occasion, for example, when he was 
pitted against Mr. Shaw. He was elected only by 
a small majority over Mr. Shaw. I spoke on that 
occasion myself, and I said that I personally would 
rather not make any change at such a time ; that if 
Mr. Shaw had not been quite a satisfactory leader 
up to that moment, it was perhaps because he had 
not entirely understood the feelings and desires of 
the majority of the Irish people, and that I person- 
ally would have been for giving him another chance. 
Since, however, Mr. Parnell had been proposed as 
leader of the party, — I was standing as I spoke just 
between Mr. Shaw and Mr. Parnell, — I could not 
have the slightest doubt as to the vote I was to 
give : I should unhesitatingly vote for Mr. Parnell 
as the man best qualified to lead the Irish party, 
and in whom the Irish people had the fullest con- 
fidence. I mention all this now, only to illustrate 
the fact that the Catholic members of the party — 
and they were many — who chafed at Mr. Shaw's 
leadership, never thought of looking about for a 
Catholic to lead them. On the other hand, there 
were some, not a few, Catholics then in the party 



THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. \\>j 

who thought Mr. Parnell far too extreme a man to 
make a safe leader; but none of them put for.ward 
a Catholic name. In fact, the question of Catholic 
and Protestant was never raised, was never talked 
of, was, I firmly believe, never thought of, in con- 
nection with the choice of a leader for the Irish 
parliamentary party. Yet, if there were any feel- 
ings of distrust on the one side or on the other, 
then it would seem was surely a time when such 
feelings must find some sort of expression. Those 
who talk about the rival bigotries of Catholic and 
Protestant in Ireland are talking of a long-buried 
past, or they are talking of what they do not under- 
stand. There are the Orangemen, of course, and 
many of them are bigoted and savage enough in all 
conscience ; and of course, as is inevitable, by show- 
ing themselves bigoted and savage, they drive some 
of their opponents into acts of retaliation. But no 
one who knows Ireland, really believes that the 
Orangemen represent the intelligence and the re- 
spectability, the good feeling and the patriotism, 
of the Protestants of Ireland. The Orangemen of 
Ireland are a very small number of men when com- 
pared with the population of the country ; I should 
as soon think of describing the old Ku-Klux organ- 
ization as representative of the people of America, 



Il8 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

North and South, as I should think of regarding 
the bigotry of Irish Orangemen as any indication 
of the general feeling of Irish Protestants. Then 
we must make allowance even for the Orangemen. 
The ascendency of sect for which they have been 
struggling so long and so fiercely is gone forever, 
and they know it. All their political hopes have 
left, or, at all events, are leaving them. A nation- 
alist sits for one of the divisions of Belfast itself. 
A nationalist sits for Derry City. Of the repre- 
sentatives of the province of Ulster, a majority are 
nationalists. Nationalism has a majority of the 
population, as it has a majority of the representa- 
tion, of Ulster. Take my own case. I sit for Derry 
City, long believed to be the very stronghold and 
fastness of Orange ascendency. In Derry City the 
Catholics are far indeed from having a majority 
of the votes. If it were a question of Catholic 
against Protestant, I should not have had the small- 
est chance in Derry, should never have thought of 
contesting the seat. I sit for Derry by virtue of 
the support which patriotic Protestants have given 
me. 

Let us look at this matter from another point of 
view. Let us come to the provinces and counties 
which we call Catholic distinctively ; the constitu- 



THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. 119 

encies where five voters out of six are Catholic, 
where no man could possibly have the faintest 
hope of success, except through the favor of the 
Catholic voters. What has happened in many of 
these constituencies ? Protestant Episcopalians and 
Presbyterians from Ulster have been invited to 
stand for these Catholic constituencies, and now 
represent them in the House of Commons. Who 
ever said during all that time, "We won't have a 
Protestant ; we must have representatives of our 
own faith " ? The Catholic who ventured to whis- 
per any thing of the kind would have found little 
welcome from his neighbors of his own faith. It 
was very significant, and very touching as well, 
when, during the debate on Gladstone's Home Rule 
Bill, man after man arose from among the Parnellite 
ranks, and began his speech in some such words as 
these: "Mr. Speaker, I rise as an Ulster Protest- 
ant to advocate this measure of Home Rule for 
Ireland." Nothing is more extraordinary, is more 
misleading, is more absurd, than the manner in 
which some writers and speakers treat of what they 
are pleased to call " Protestant Ulster." They have 
created for themselves an entirely imaginary Ulster, 
an Ulster composed of anti-national Protestants 
only, an Ulster living within a pale of anti-national 



120 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

sentiment, an Ulster which, in the event of an} 
Home Rule scheme being introduced and likely 
to pass, would pray to be legislatively annexed to 
Scotland rather than endure companionship with 
the Irish of Leinster and Munster and Connaught. 
The real Ulster is an Ulster in which the Catholic 
and Protestant populations are very nearly equal in 
numbers, and are for the most part mixed up inex- 
tricably. There are, of course, places, like certain 
divisions of the city of Belfast, which may be called 
altogether Protestant ; and there is also the county 
of Donegal, which may be called altogether Catholic. 
If we have regard to politics only, we shall find that 
of the Ulster counties, a fourth part of Down, a 
third part of Armagh, half of Tyrone, the whole 
of Donegal, the whole of Cavan, and the whole of 
Monaghan, are represented by nationalists. Mr. 
Chamberlain has some delightful plan for exempting 
Ulster from the rule of a national Parliament. How 
will he do it ? All the frontier counties, if I may 
call them so, the counties which draw near and 
nearer to Leinster and Connaught, are nationalist. 
I suppose he would hardly say to the inhabitants of 
these counties, " We don't care what you think or 
what you want ; we say you shall not be joined with 
the rest of Ireland." But then it is not these fron- 



THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. 121 

tier counties alone that are nationalist. Far away 
to the north there is Donegal, entirely Catholic 
and entirely nationalist. Londonderry and Antrim 
are, in fact, the only counties where any case could 
possibly be made out for separate legislation. Well, 
but we had South Londonderry in the last Parlia- 
ment, and only lost it this time by a small majority 
obtained against us by the temporary junction of 
the secessionist Liberals with the Tories. Is there 
nothing to be said for the national sentiments of 
the minority, who are, after all, only a minority 
in name and in the parliamentary sense, of the 
people of South Londonderry ? And then, what 
about the majority of the population of Derry City, 
the capital of the county, who have declared for 
nationalism, and elected a follower of Mr. Parnell to 
be their representative ? What is ingenious Mr. 
Chamberlain going to do with them ? What about 
the population of the western division of the city of 
Belfast, the capital city of Antrim, who have em- 
phatically declared for nationalism, and elected my 
friend Mr. Sexton to represent them in Parliament ? 
What about the simple fact that the majority of the 
people of Ulster are in favor of an Irish national 
Parliament ? I have no hesitation in saying, that if 
the question be left to Ulster, and to Ulster alone, 



122 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

if the plebiscite of all the men of Ulster be taken, 
and Leinster, Munster, and Connaught stand out 
and are silent, the voice of the majority of Ulster 
men will proclaim Home Rule for Ireland. Look at 
the absurdity in which the arguments of men like 
Mr. Chamberlain involve them. So profound is 
their distrust of Irish Catholics, so rooted their 
conviction that, if these Catholics got a chance, they 
would delight in the oppression of their Protestant 
fellow-countrymen, including Mr. Parnell, of course, 
— so strong is their conviction of this kind, that 
they would not consent to leave the Protestants of 
Ulster at the mercy of an Irish national Parliament. 
Yet the Protestants of Ulster are -many and strong; 
they have wealth ; they have energy. We are 
always hearing from their English admirers how 
far superior they are to the population of the other 
provinces ; they have the whole Conservative and 
Liberal secessionist party to watch over them, to 
champion their interests, to secure them against 
wrong. But these same Liberal secessionist gen- 
tlemen are perfectly willing to abandon the Prot- 
estants of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught ; the 
Protestants who in many places are not in the 
proportion of one to six among the population. 
They are perfectly willing to leave these Protest- 



THE PROTESTANT MINORITY. 1 23 

ants, few, scattered, cut off from Ulster, — they 
are perfectly willing to commit them to the mer- 
cies of an Irish national Parliament. Good gentle- 
men of the Liberal secession party, you know very 
well you don't mean what you are saying. You are 
not half so bad as you give yourselves out to be. 
I do not like Mr. Chamberlain now as well as I did 
once, but I do not believe he is a monster of in- 
justice and inhumanity. And yet what but a mon- 
ster of injustice and inhumanity would he be, if he 
were really willing to abandon the Protestants of the 
South and West, few and defenceless as they are, 
to a tyranny which he says would be unendurable 
to the strong and numerous Protestants of the 
North ? Of course he would not do any thing of 
the kind. He knows perfectly well that the Protest- 
ants of the South would be as safe under an Irish 
Parliament, as the Catholics of the South. He 
knows very well that the Protestants of the North 
would be equally safe, but it would not suit him to 
admit that now. So he sets up an entirely imagin- 
ary Ulster, and he tries to fan again, into a flame, 
the dying fires of religious bigotry and sectarian 
antipathy in England and in Ireland too. He is 
a clever man, and he is not weighed down with any 
heavy load of scruples in political matters. Also, 



124 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

he is, for an eminent public man, singularly ignorant 
of the history of any thing except that of modern 
Birmingham ; and absolute ignorance makes a man 
very bold with his experiments sometimes. But 
he will never get Ii eland to accept his imaginary 
Ulster; Ulster herself will tell him so if he really 
wants to hear the truth of the story. 



THE MAKING OF THE NATION. 125 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE MAKING OF THE NATION. 

1\ T EANTIME I am glad and proud to say that the 
±y*- nation is making itself. Ireland is practising 
the great art of self-government. She is training 
herself in every way. It is not too much to say that 
at no other period of Ireland's history did Irishmen 
at home and abroad ever fall into such well-ordered 
lines of discipline. The disunion among themselves, 
the internecine quarrels, which destroyed so many 
hopeful efforts in former times, are unknown in this 
movement. Many hard things are said every day 
about the Irish parliamentary party by its enemies ; 
but no one has ever said of it that it is not a well- 
disciplined party. No one who looks at the personnel 
of that party can possibly doubt that there must be 
many differences of opinion among the men who 
compose it. All sorts and conditions of men are in 
that party. There are landlords in it, not. a few ; 
and there are the sons of peasants. There are 



126 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

soldiers who have won distinction in the service of 
the Queen ; soldiers who won distinction in the 
French, the Austrian, the American army ; there 
are men who belonged to the ranks of the Fenian 
insurrection. There are Irish-Americans ; there is 
at least one pure-blooded Englishman. There are 
some rich bankers ; there are clever and successful 
lawyers ; there are one or two working artisans ; 
there are sharp, shrewd men of business ; there are 
journalists and novelists and poets and learned pro- 
fessors. It would be impossible to believe that a party 
thus made up could always find itself in spontaneous 
agreement of opinion. Yet the party always meets 
the House of Commons as a united party; as one 
man. The explanation of this is that the Irish party 
debate every question in their private meetings, and 
"bolt it to the bran," the youngest and rawest recruit 
having as good a right to be heard, and obtaining as 
ready a hearing, as the most distinguished of the 
veterans ; and the discussion is sometimes keen and 
warm enough. And when all who desire to speak 
have spoken, the leader of the party then gives his 
opinion, or else he declares, as he has often done, 
that it is a subject on which he prefers the guid- 
ance of the party without expressing any opinion 
of his own ; and then a division is taken, and the 



THE MAKING OF THE NATION. \2J 

party is bound by the fundamental principle of its 
constitution to abide by the vote of its majority. 
So the nationalist Irish members come out from 
their committee-room, and pass into the House of 
Commons ; and when the division is taken, they 
vote as one man. Keen is the curiosity, the anxi- 
ety, the eagerness, felt all through the House of 
Commons, on the eve of some great division, about 
the vote of the Irish party. Sometimes there are rea- 
sons which make it proper and necessary to keep our 
decision a secret to the last moment ; and when this 
is resolved on, the secret is faithfully kept. All this 
is training for self-government : all this is self-gov- 
ernment. Then take the institutions of Ireland her- 
self. The only really representative bodies we have 
are the corporations and town councils of the large 
cities. What has happened in these assemblies? 
Although the municipal franchise is even still a very 
narrow and restricted one in most of our commu- 
nities, yet the national party have taken possession 
of nearly all those corporate bodies. Wherever 
there is any reality in the representative system, 
there the electors send nationalists to represent 
them. No one can deny that the cause of muni- 
cipal government has benefited immensely by the 
change from the condition of things when only 



128 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

Tories and old-fashioned " Whigs," as they are 
called in Ireland, had possession of our corporate 
bodies. The same healthy breath of national public 
opinion which purified the representation has puri- 
fied also the atmosphere of municipal life. Town 
councils which were hotbeds of jobbery and some- 
thing like corruption then, are above suspicion now. 
It is to the honor of the present municipal legis- 
lators, who are, of course, Catholics in the great 
majority, that, although they have succeeded to 
men who always, when they could, would contrive 
to shut out Catholics from every sort of public 
employment, they have never, in the smallest in- 
stance or in the largest, where public employment 
was concerned, made the slightest difference be- 
tween the services of Protestants and the services 
of Catholics. No one who knows the places — no 
one who saw such cities a few years ago, and has 
seen them lately — will deny that the nationalist 
town councils have shown a capacity and an energy 
for public work which certainly was not known to, 
or, at all events, was not exhibited by, their pred- 
ecessors. Great public improvements have been 
made, public funds have been managed economi- 
cally, sanitary arrangements have been introduced, 
which would do credit to the greatest of English 



THE MAKING OF THE NATION. 1 29 

cities. The bitterest anti-nationalist would not 
think of making such charges against the corpora- 
tion of the city of Dublin as those which were 
lately made, and which formed the subject of public 
scandal and public investigation, against the cor- 
poration of the city of London. Oar boards of 
guardians are not representative. At least, they 
only admit the principle of representation half way 
— not quite half way. The majority of the mem- 
bers of these boards are nominated by the Crown ; 
a certain number are elected by the people, but 
on a somewhat narrow franchise. Where the rep- 
resentative principle prevails, the nationalist candi- 
dates are always, or almost always, elected. Our 
grand juries are an institution which I trust is 
unknown to any other civilized people. As Sydney 
Smith humorously said, when speaking of the Irish 
State Church in the old days, " Nothing that we 
know of the internal condition of Timbuctoo would 
warrant us in supposing that the people of that 
country would put up with such an anomaly." An 
Irish grand jury is not only a tribunal of first 
instance in criminal law, but it is also the financial 
body intrusted with the raising and the spending 
of money for road-making, bridge-making, and all 
other such county works ; and it is a body nominated 



130 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

by the county sheriff, who is himself nominated by 
the Castle. It is hardly necessary to say that the 
Irish national party do not command a majority in 
the grand juries. Indeed, this fact in itself may 
be said to tell the whole story. Where the people 
elect, the national party always have the majority. 
Where the Castle appoints, good care is taken that 
only men are employed whom the people would 
never elect. We had a curious instance lately, in 
Dublin, of the manner in which even old castle 
strongholds have to yield sometimes to the change 
in the condition of things. Dublin City has a right 
to appoint her sheriff in this way : The corporation 
submits to the lord-lieutenant the names of three 
men, and the lord-lieutenant selects one of the 
three. This plan worked most satisfactorily for 
the Castle and the British garrison party, so long 
as the city council was altogether in the hands of 
the Tories and the Whigs. The sort of men from 
whom the Castle would always be glad to choose 
were invariably submitted to the choice of the 
Castle. But now, behold, the condition of things 
is entirely changed. The Dublin town council has 
only a very few members who are not stanch Home 
Rulers ; and last year the council astonished the 
Castle by presenting as the three names from which 



THE MAKING OF THE NATION. 131 

the selection for the sheriff's office was to be 
made, the names of Mr. Sexton, Mr. Dillon, and 
Mr. Healy. What was to be done ? Mr. Dillon was 
actually then under prosecution by the Castle ; Mr. 
Healy and Mr. Sexton were the avowed and un- 
compromising enemies of the whole Castle-system. 
All three men had been in prison on some political 
charge or other, or else under Mr. Forster's Suspi- 
cion Act, when a man could be imprisoned against 
whom no charge was made, or was even intended 
to be made. What was to be done ? The lord 
lieutenant had to choose, the Act of Parliament 
said so ; the Act which was made at a time when 
there was as little thought of a nationalist town 
council in Dublin as of popular government in 
Siberia. The lord lieutenant saw no better way 
out of the difficulty than by appointing Mr. Sexton, 
over whose head, at all events, no castle prosecution 
was hanging just at that moment. Not many cities, 
I think, have a great orator for their high sheriff. 
Every one remembers how, in the immortal 
" Monte Cristo " of the elder Dumas, the prisoner 
of the Chateau d'lf tries through all the horror and 
the darkness and the wasting weariness of his cell, 
to keep up his physical strength by physical exer- 
cise. He has set his heart on escape. He believes, 



132 IRELAND'S CAUSE. 

with a kind of passionate faith, that sooner or later 
he is to be free ; and he is determined that the 
moment which finds him free shall find him also 
a strong and a capable man, ready to defend his 
friends and to punish his enemies. I have some- 
times thought that what is told of Edmond Dantes 
might be told in a manner of Ireland. During the 
long term of her imprisonment the mind of the 
country was set on enfranchisement, and was deter- 
mined to be able to make fitting use of legislative 
independence when, in the mercy of Providence, the 
hour for legislative independence should come. So, 
through all these years, the Irish people have been 
training themselves for the work of self-government 
in order that there may be no delay ; that they may 
be ready when the time comes. Thus we see, under 
our very eyes, the forming of a nation going on. 
When the day comes, and it is but a short way off 
now, on which the imperial Parliament shall say to 
Ireland, "We emancipate you from subjection; we 
give you your own Parliament : go and form your- 
selves into a nation," Ireland, speaking with pride 
for her people, can say, " Behold, we are a nation 
trained and taught — self-trained, self-taught — for 
all the responsibilities and all the work of a 
nation." 



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